Day Thirty: (No) Tame Ni

Daily Vocabulary

For the last vocab set of the 30 Day Challenge, we are going to go over vocabulary that are needed for any basic foundation of language learning – colors! While colors sound very rudimentary, there are a few things you should know about them before you using them in your Japanese. The first important point about colors is that they are different if you use them as a noun, an adjective, or as the color itself. For instance, you’ll see aka, the word for red, as aka, akai, and akairo depending on the circumstance. Aka is predominantly used when combined in other words, such as akashingo (a red light). However, when we want to describe something as being the color red, we add an い onto it to form an i-adjective, making it akai. This is perhaps the most common use. One way to say “your blushing” is “kao ga akai”, or “your face is red”, using akai with the i-adjective ending. In reference to the actual color, akairo is commonly used, aka being red and iro being the word for color. Ao, kuro and shiro follow this same pattern, however, some of the colors follow a different pattern. The second point to remember is that colors such as murasaki and midori don’t form i-adjectives, rather, they are only used as the noun/adjective form (murasaki and midori) or as the color murasakiiro and midoriiro. Lastly, some color words require iro to be included to distinctly refer to the color. Hai and cha mean ash and tea respetively, so they need iro attached to refer to the words grey and brown. 

There are more color words and ways to describe color that we won’t go into today, but pay attention to the distinctive patterns for each color in order to use them correctly.