In German we express assumptions or suspicions in many ways. Take a look:
1. Futur I: Die Trainingskleidung mit einem UV-Strahlen-Sensor wird wohl bald den Markt erobern.
2. Modal Verbs KII: Die Trainingskleidung mit einem UV-Strahlen-Sensor dürfte bald den Markt erobern.
3. Adverbs: Die Trainingskleidung mit einem UV-Strahlen-Sensor erobert wahrscheinlich bald den Markt.
The most frequently ones uses are the variants using adverbs and then modal verbs which we will discuss in this chapter:
Use of modal verbs to express assumptions
You got to know the modal verbs in your very first month of your German learning career and back then their use was hopefully mostly clear to you. At that time, you could easily translate a modal verb to get the gist of it. Now, translation won’t help you at all as we are entering the subjective use of modal verbs.
The speaker expresses her personal perception of things and adds information about her relation towards the shared information by using modal verbs in a subjective manner.
Below you will find my try to rank/grade the level of distance between speaker and reported information indicated by the tools mentioned above (top = 100%, bottom = 0%). This is a very rough ranking.Take it with a mountain of salt please. Often the context, if known to you, will already give away a speaker’s level of identification with the message:
100% - Sie muss gleich hier sein. - Indikativ
90% - Sie müsste gleich hier sein.
90% - Sie sollte gleich hier sein.
80% - Sie dürfte gleich hier sein.
50% - Sie könnte gleich hier sein.
And there are many other variants of subjective modal verbs which you'll undoubtly pick up over time. Feel free to share your findings with us in the Community and we'll discuss them there.
This topic is covered in: C1-L23