Can you say, “I wish you’ll be happy” ? No. You formulated a grammatical sentence and there is no problem in getting the meaning, but there is a little problem with the use of the word “wish”. You would rather want to say, “I hope you’ll be happy”.
Some Francophone kids produce utterances like that and it’s sometimes quite funny to hear or read.
Tonight in class we were taught about the meanings of the words wish and hope. To be sure that was only a very, very small part of the three-hour class, but still it stayed with me simply because we talked about hope.
Wish carries the idea of the impossible (apart for declarative sentences). While hope carries the idea of possibility. Basically, we always wish for the impossible and we always hope for a possibility.
It’s quite different to say, “I wish he came” and “I hope he comes” I know the verb tense is different but it would be ungrammatical to use the same tense. Anyways, you get the picture.
I was thinking about the word hope in class. I as a Christian do not have wishes, I have confident hope.
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I would say that for me wish is extremely important. Because the impossible for us is more than possible for God. So I let myself wish, so that He can do the impossible.
I understand what you’re saying and I agree.
But I think that I usually don’t “wish” for things. I “hope” for things, justement parce que je sais que Dieu peut tout faire! Wish démondre quelque chose dans les airs que personne ne controlle, alors que “hope” démontre une confiance en Dieu.
Did you know that as a fluent Canadian, i never noticed a difference between hope and wish…?
Hmmm… no I didn’t know. But it’s obvious that we can’t use hope and wish interchangeably!
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