The reason for saying that English has no future tense goes beyond just morphology. 'Will' is a modal operator that has no inherent future sense. For example, you can say "John will be here already". You can't do that with a true future tense. See e.g. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005471.h... for more on this. If you try translating the examples at the bottom into a language with a true future tense, then 90% of them will come out as gibberish, or as meaning something quite different.

It depends on how you define a tense. Strictly speaking, English has no morphological future tense, but some tense-aspect combinations are commonly referred to as a “future tense”. In Spanish, unlike «haber», «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in conjugation and therefore the present continuous-ish construction is not treated as a proper tense or tense-aspect pair.

There is something I’m not getting. If “I am talking” is the present continuous tense, why is «Estoy hablando» not the same tense? They seem to be exactly analogous: a verb for to be, conjugated, followed by the present participle.

I’m not a linguist, but here’s how I see it: They are analogous expressions, but as I mentioned, «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in Spanish conjugation. You only have «haber», while English has “to be”, “to have” and “to do”. So, technically, in English the expression is “conjugated form of auxiliary to be + gerund” while in Spanish it is defined as a paraphrasis composed of “conjugated form of to be + gerund”. Tomayto, tomahto.

To be clear, this is just a difference in the traditional grammatical terminology for each language. Linguistically speaking neither English nor Spanish has any such thing as a "present continuous tense".

Of course, the exact linguistic notion of "tense" is not particularly relevant to most people learning a language. I'm not objecting to its broader use in the context of language learning.