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Lesson 6: Adjectives
[Video Link]
In this lesson we are going to talk about adjectives. Now, Japanese adjectives are not the same thing as English adjectives. As we know, Japanese sentences come in three fundamental kinds, depending on the kind of engine they have.
We have the う-Train, verb sentences; the だ-Train, noun sentences; and the い-Train, which is the so-called "adjectival" sentences.
But the truth is that any one of the three kinds of engine can be used like an adjective. So let's start off with the most obvious one, the one that's called "adjective" in English.
A simple い-Train sentence is ペン が 赤い. As you know, 赤い [あかい] doesn't mean "red", it means "is-red".
Now, we can turn this black engine white and put it behind the pen. Now we have 赤い ペン が
赤い ペン means "is-red pen" or, as we say in English, "red pen". As you see, this isn't a full sentence in itself any more because a white engine doesn't pull the train, it just tells us more about whatever it is sitting behind.
So 赤い, once it becomes a white engine, is just telling us more about the main car of the sentence, which is "pen". And if we want to make it into a full sentence, we have to have a new engine.
Let's take 小さい [ちいさい], which means "is-small".
赤い ペン が 小さい
"The red pen is small".
So that's simple enough. Now let's look at verbs. If you're worrying about "na-adjectives", as they are called, don't worry. They are nouns, and we'll get to them in a minute.
Any う-Train, any verb, in any tense, can be used like an adjective. So, we can say:
| 少女 が |
歌った |
| しょうじょ が |
うたった |
| girl |
sang |
The word for sing is 歌う [うたう], so the た-form, as we know from our last lesson, is 歌った.
"The girl sang", and if we turn that engine white and put it behind the girl, we have:
歌った 少女
"the girl who sang".
And of course, once again this isn't a sentence. But we can put in into any sentence we like, such as:
| 歌った |
少女 が |
眠て |
いる |
| うたった |
しょうじょ が |
ねて |
|
| sang |
girl |
sleep |
to be |
"the girl who sang is sleeping"
And this is terribly important because a lot of Japanese is structured this way. We can use entire verb-sentences as adjectivals if we want to, and this happens very often. For example:
| 犬 が |
辞書 を |
食べた |
| いぬ が |
じしょ を |
たべた |
| dog |
dictionary |
ate |
"the dog ate the dictionary"
We can turn this around to:
| 辞書 を |
食べた |
犬 |
| じしょ を |
たべた |
いぬ |
| dictionary |
ate |
dog |
"the dog who ate the dictionary"
Or we can say:
| 犬 が |
食べた |
辞書 |
| いぬ が |
たべた |
じしょ |
| dog |
ate |
dictionary |
"the dictionary that was eaten by the dog"
And then this can build into the full sentence:
| 辞書 を |
食べた |
犬 が |
やんちゃ だ |
| じしょ を |
たべた |
いぬ が |
|
| dictionary |
ate |
dog |
naughty |
やんちゃ is a noun that means "naughty" or "bad", so, "the dog who ate the dictionary is bad". This brings us to the noun-engine. If we just say:
| 犬 が |
やんちゃ だ |
| いぬ が |
|
| dog |
naughty |
...we have a simple noun sentence. But we can turn this engine as well into a white engine and put it behind the dog. But there is one change we have to make. When we turn だ or です into a white engine, when we connect it to anything, it changes its form from だ to な.
So we say:
| やんちゃ な |
犬 が |
|
いぬ が |
| naughty |
dog |
"is-bad dog / the dog that is bad / the bad dog".
To make a full sentence out of it:
| やんちゃ な |
犬 が |
眠て |
いる |
|
いぬ が |
ねて |
|
| naughty |
dog |
sleep |
to be |
"the bad dog is sleeping"
Now, the important thing to note here is that you can't do this with every noun. There are only some nouns that are frequently used in an adjectival way, that you can use in the way we showed here. These are what the textbooks call "na-adjectives", and it's a slightly confusing term, because as we see they are in fact nouns, but they are a certain class of noun.
Can we use other nouns as adjectives? Yes, we can, but we use them in a somewhat different way and they aren't engines. To explain this we have to introduce a new type of car for our train. And this is the の car.
の is a very simple particle because it works exactly like apostrophe-s ['s] in English. So:
"Sakura's dress"
"my nose"
Luckily, we don't have to worry about things like "my" and "your" and "her" and "his" in Japanese; we always just use の.
Now, because の is the possessive particle, it can be used in another, slightly different way. I always used to say:
カワジャパ の キュアドリー です
"I am KawaJapa's Cure Dolly".
In other words, KawaJapa is the group or party or website that I belong to. And we can use this more widely for defining the group or class to which anything belongs.
So, 赤い means "is-red" because we can turn the noun 赤 into the adjectival form 赤い. But we can't do that with all colors. For example, ピンク色.
色 [いろ] means "color", and we say ピンク色, that means "pink". But that doesn't have an い-form. And it doesn't count as an adjectival noun, a "na-adjective", as they are called in English, either. So what we do with it is, we use の.
ピンク色 の ドレス
"pink dress", or more specifically, "dress belonging to the class of pink things"
If we want to say "Oscar the Rabbit", we say うさぎ の オスカー, which literally means "rabbit's Oscar", and what it means is "Oscar who belongs to the class 'rabbit'".
"the legend of Zelda"
| 伝説 の |
戦士 |
| でんせつ の |
せんし |
| legend |
warrior |
"legendary warrior / warrior who belongs to the class of legendary things"
So we have four ways of forming adjectivals: the three engines plus the の car.
And using this we can make all kinds of sentences and they can become very complex, especially with verbal adjectives in which we can use whole complex sentences in an adjectival manner. Here some worksheets that will help us to get used to some of those more complex sentences:
• Worksheet #2 (PDF)
• Worksheet #2 Answer Key (PDF)
Now, one thing you may be thinking is, "Since some nouns are used as adjectives with な and some with の, do I have to start learning lists of which ones go with の and which ones go with な?"
And my answer to that is, I don't see any good reason to do so unless you are having to learn them for an exam. Why not? Well, look at it logically.
If you hear someone use them with either の or な, you're going to know what they're saying. If you use them yourself and you get it wrong, nobody is going to have any difficulty understanding what you're saying, and it's a very small and typical foreigner's mistake, and frankly I think it's the least of your worries at an early stage.
If you're writing, you can of course look them up very easily. As you use Japanese more, hear more Japanese, read more Japanese, you will pick up which ones are の and which ones are な.
And if you're not going to use Japanese very much, well, why do you need to know? To me, Japanese isn't a game of learning abstract information for no particular reason. It's a language that for the most part we can learn in a natural manner, and understanding its real structure helps us very greatly to do that.