Semester 2 Week 3 Part A

Hello everyone,

Welcome to week 3. This lesson we're going to talk about adjectives.

Japanese has two types of adjectives.
1. True Adjective
2. Adjectival Noun (sometimes called Na な Adjectives)

True Adjectives

First we're going to look at True Adjectives

True Adjectives finish with Ai, ii, ui, oi

Changing True Adjectives to Present, Past, Negative, Affirmative

'i' = い	Present	Past
Affirmative	Remains the same.	Drop the last 'i'. Add 'Katta'
Negative	Drop the last 'i'. Add 'Kunai'	Drop the last 'i'. Add 'Kunakatta'

NOTE: いい (ii) = Good in English. いい is irregular. Do not follow the rules set in the above table.

'Good' = いい	Present	Past
Affirmative	いい Remains the same.	いい Becomes 'Yokatta'
Negative	いい Becomes 'Yokuna'	いい Becomes 'Yokunakatta'

Remember: Add 'desu' onto True Adjective sentences to be polite. It does not matter if True Adjective is past or present tense, just leave Desu.

Example sentence using True Adjective - 'Yasashii' which means Easy
Japanese: Nihongo wa yasashikunai desu
English: Japanese language is not easy.

Let's break it down...
1. Nihongo = Japanese (language)
2. wa = particle marking topic of sentence
3. Yasashikunai = 'Present Negative' (Is Not) form of Yasashi. Yasashi = Easy
4. Desu = 'is'

I'll leave you all with some True Adjectives.
Muzukashii = Difficult
Omoshiroi = Interesting/Funny
Tanoshii = Fun
Tsumaranai = Boring
Ookii = Big
Chisai = Small
Sukunanai = Few, little
Ooi = Many, a large number of

END

Remember when you're looking up Japanese adjectives you can tell if it's a True Adjective by seeing if it ends in Ai, ii, ui, oi. Adjectival Nouns otherwise called な Adjectives do not have these endings. We'll learn the rules on how to use Adjectival Nouns and how to join both True and な adjectives together.

I hope you all found this lesson enjoyable!

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