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Gogaku

All N4 grammar

N4

〜だろう

Probably… — the plain form of でしょうmachine translation

FormationPlain form + だろう (nouns and な-adjectives drop だ)

だろう is the plain form of the でしょう you learned at N5: the speaker guesses at something without being completely certain — "probably, most likely". It often appears with たぶん. Before だろう, verbs and い-adjectives stay in the plain form; nouns and な-adjectives drop だ: 雨だろう, 元気だろう.

With rising intonation at the end — 〜だろう? — the sentence becomes a confirmation question, like "right?": 難しいだろう?. This usage is like でしょう? but casual and rather masculine-sounding; in conversation, women more often use でしょ?.

Compared with 〜かもしれない, だろう expresses a clearly higher degree of certainty: 雨が降るだろう is "it will probably rain", while 雨が降るかもしれない is only "it might rain". In writing such as news articles and forecasts, だろう appears very frequently.

Examples

Related patterns

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