な Adjectives

“A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.” - Alan Perlis

Japanese character Na

The very first thing you need to learn about Japanese adjectives is that there are two different kinds of Japanese adjectives. な adjectives (which you’ll be learning now) and い adjectives (which you’ll be learning next chapter). Luckily, their names make quite a bit of sense most of the time (minus a few exceptions), so it won’t be hard for you to tell the difference between them. More on that in a bit.

This chapter is all about the easier of the two adjectives, the な adjectives. In fact, you’ve already learned a couple of な adjectives in previous chapters: すき and きらい. Remember those? Back in those chapters, though, you never learned about the な part. As you go through this chapter, we’ll bring up すき and きらい again so you can practice as well as learn how they can be used as な adjectives (along with all the other ones, too).

Just in case you didn’t know, adjectives are description words, as in, they describe things. For example, a wet dog, or a funny monkey. The words in italics are describing something else. That’s what we’re learning about now, describing.

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