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As far as I can tell, if you want to say something like "Would you...?" or "Why don't you..?", it's common to say something like "食べるのだろうか？". I looked it up and as I far as I can tell it's short form+の to make it a noun, and then だろう which is the volitional of だ... this is after a lot of Googling around and I'm still kind of confused, since I haven't even heard the volitional mentioned in my class yet. Please tell me if that's right.

If I understand Wikipedia correctly, you could also say "食べようか？". First off, is that conjugating it right; second, is that something you would say; finally, how is it different from -の+だろう?

Thanks for any help.

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What do you mean by "would you...?" or "why don't you...?"? These feel like two different things to me. Can you give a couple of example sentences? To me, 「食べようか？」 sounds like "shall we eat(, then)?", and 「食べるのだろうか？」 sounds like "(I wonder whether) he (or whoever) eats?". – Billy Oct 22 '12 at 22:45
I was thinking more like "Would you kindly...?", like, making a request or suggestion that way. – Alex Meiburg Oct 23 '12 at 0:04
But requests and suggestions are different things, even in English! You're going to have to give us some full example sentences. But in addition to dainichi's suggestions, here are a couple more. For requests, you might want to consider 「（食べて）くださいませんか？」 (a polite "would you mind (=do me the favour of) eating?"). For suggestions, "let's eat!" is 「食べましょう！」. You can soften this by adding a ね onto the end, or turning it into a question ("shall we eat?" 「食べましょうか？」). You can make all of these more informal by replacing the polite-form 食べましょう with the plain-form 食べよう. – Billy Oct 23 '12 at 18:04

2 Answers

up vote -1 down vote

I've listed up some forms here for you.

食べませんか？　- Won't you eat (with me) [as in an invitation]
食べようか - Shall we eat
食べるのだろうか　- I don't think I have ever heard this said 
but I guess it would be equivalent to the the below.
食べようかな - I wonder if I will eat
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for the third one, Billy is right. – oldergod Oct 23 '12 at 3:33
up vote 1 down vote

There are many ways to make requests/suggestions in Japanese, but (some of) the prototypical ones would be:

1 Requests (in order of increasing politeness/formality):

食べてもらえる？
食べてもらえますか？
食べていただけます(でしょう)か？

Of course you could just say 食べてください, which would be the polite way to express an imperative.

2 Suggestions (in order of increasing politeness/formality):

食べたらどう？
食べたらどうですか？
食べたらいかがでしょうか？

but I would be careful about using these when it's really not a suggestion, but a request that I'm making, since that could sound sarcastic and rude.

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