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Recently, I've seen this sentence somewhere:

簡単に入れる大学に入って、いい結婚相手を見つければいいかな。

I'd like to know what is the meaning of the ~ばいいかな construction here - is it merely a "I wonder if..." sentence ("I wonder if I'll find a good husband/wife...") or is it closer to ~ばいいな, i.e. "I wish I found a good husband"?

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I can't give you the grammar behind it, but I can give you the translation and explanation. Hopefully there's someone who can answer the grammar part in more detail.

I guess I'd be fine with geting into a easy college and find a good husband/wife.

I think context is needed to explain this translation. Seeing the Japanese, the question I assume that is being asked is something to the effect of:

これからの進路はどうするつもり?
What are your plans for the future? (to a high school student)

So imagine a high school student thinking about this, not having a concrete plan yet, so he/she is throwing out a very vague and answer. The 「~ばいい」 here is not "should" but "it would be nice if" or "I would be fine with".

I read 「かな」 here as "I guess", something that is more vague than uncertain.

I can't tell you why, but the only way I would see 「かな」 as "I wonder" is if there was 「の」 before it, making it more of a question.

簡単に入れる大学に入って、いい結婚相手を見つければいいかな。
I wonder if I should enter an easy college and find a good husband/wife.

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  • Thank you. My mistake for not adding more content. I've researched this further and it's a snippet from a book (which I found in the Shonagon corpus). Here is more context: あかねにとっては、高校受験の失敗によるダメージは相当大きなもので、どんなに努力してもまた失敗するのではないかとの気持ちをなかなかぬぐい去ることができず、「女なんだからそんなに頑張っていい大学に入ることもないかな。簡単に入れる大学に入って、いい結婚相手を見つければいいかな」などとあたかも母の価値観を肯定するような言動が時として見られた。
    – Jan
    Apr 28, 2017 at 17:12
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「すればいい」(and also「したらいい」) is often translated as "should". Not so much in the moral sense, like when someone says "you shouldn't steal", but in the very everyday sense. A good example of this is the fact that 「どこに行けばいい?」is a fairly common construction used to ask where someone should go, for example if you're trying to meet up with your friend.

The 「かな」here mostly adds a nuance of uncertainty, like the person expressing this isn't quite certain that what they're saying is correct/desirable.

Putting all of that together, I would translate this as something like

"I wonder if I should just get into an easy university and find an someone good to marry."

"I wonder" could also easily be "maybe", "perhaps", or your choice of phrase to express uncertainty. I also went from "easy to get into university" to "easy university" because the latter is a little more natural in English.

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簡単に入れる大学に入って、いい結婚相手を見つければいいかな

This sentence means I hope I'm going to get into an easy university and find someone to marry.

She doesn't think making effort for studying or working. Her life's goal is to get married to rich nice man.

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