Sunday, February 8, 2015

conditionals - Tense agreement: If I have a chance... I would

Here is the example sentence my Japanese teacher who teaches English gave to her students:






  1. If I have a chance to visit... I would like to visit...




This immediately struck me as odd. My instinct is to make both verbs past tense and say:





  1. If I had the chance to visit... I would visit...





Then you have a conditional using the unreal past to describe a hypothetical situation.



Now, I assume the "would like to" is an attempt to make "want to" more formal. But my brain just doesn't like the present tense "have" and the past tense "would" put together.



My question is, is the first example sentence grammatical? And if it is grammatical, is the second sentence just more idiomatic?

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