Hazu Rules
“He has achieved success who has worked well, laughed often, and loved much.” - Elbert Hubbard
はず is a noun that’s attached to things, which means it’s treated like a noun. After the はず you’ll want to put です (or だ), and depending on the tense of the はず you might do something else (だった, じゃない, じゃなかった, etc). You’ll see what I mean by this in a minute. Since casual verbs are our focus, let’s take a look at verbs first.
Verbs
Verbs are going to be very simple because you only know positive tense dictionary form verbs right now. It goes:
v.dict ＋ はず です/だ
example: たべる はず です (expect to eat)
I think it’s a lot easier to break things up into chunks. If you add はず onto a verb, it all just becomes a noun, sort of. For example:
たべるはず = The subject/object you’re supposed to eat
のむはず = The subject/object you’re supposed to drink
It’s all one block, and you can think of that block as a noun. How do you end sentences that end with nouns? You add です or だ to them.
For verbs, all you have to remember is this:
v.dict + はず です / だ
Write it down and take notes for this, since there’ll be a few more sets of rules (below) to remember.
Nouns
Since はず is a noun, you may know where I’m headed with this. You can’t really put two nouns right next to each other (at least not most of the time), right?
With nouns, the rule is the following:
noun ＋ の ＋ はずです
example: せんせい の はず です (he’s supposed to be a teacher)
When you use はず with a noun, it’s like you’re saying something is supposed to be something else (just like in the example above). We’ll look at a lot more examples coming up, but for now the important thing is to know the rule (and take notes):
noun + の + はずです
For past tense nouns, though, it’s a little different. The pattern goes like this:
noun + だった + はずです (supposed to have been something)
Now, this shouldn’t be confused with noun + の + はずだった, which means “was expected to be something.”
Adjectives
Let’s start with な adjectives first. They’re similar to nouns, with one difference:
na-adj + な + はずです
べんりな はずです (expect to be convenient)
Past tense is just like nouns:
べんりだった はずです
Expect it was convenient
Just like we talked about in the last lesson, you’re the だった in both the nouns and na-adjectives はず rules are casual, because it’s not ending the sentence. The です/だ on the end of the entire sentence is what decides whether or not we’re speaking casually or formally.
With い adjectives, the rules are also pretty easy.
i-adj + はずです
たかい はずです (Expect to be tall)
i-adjかった + はずです
たかかった はずです (Expect to have been tall)
So, write down the above rules, and memorize what you can. They all kind of make sense, in one way or another, just based off previous rules you’ve learned with some of these before. Now it’s time to put them into practice, a bit!