Bringing It All Together

“Don’t duck the most difficult problems. That just ensures that the hardest part will be left when you are most tired. Get the big one done—it’s downhill from then on.” - Norman Vincent Peale

Alright – you’ve learned な adjectives, and you’ve learned い adjectives. As far as adjectives go, and as far as adjective vocab goes, you’ve pretty much done it all. Sure, there’s things like adverbs (and other adjective-related grammar forms), but they all come right from what you just learned in this chapter.

Now it’s time to go over and review everything adjective-related that you’ve learned. I want to make sure you have everything good before moving on, as all the adjective chapters will serve as your adjective-stuff-related foundation in future lessons.

な Adjectives

First you learned about な Adjectives, and how they work. They’re very similar to how nouns behave in a lot of ways.

When ending a sentence, な adjectives conjugate using です, でした, じゃありません, and じゃありませんでした
When coming after a noun (or when they’re on their own), you don’t use the な part of the な adjective word.
When directly preceding nouns, you do use the な part of the な adjective word.
When the な adjective is directly preceding the noun, you want to think of the なadj+noun as a single entity

い Adjectives

Then, you went on to learn about い adjectives. Besides the conjugation thing, they’re quite similar to な adjectives (which makes sense, since they’re both adjectives after all).

You can tell if an adjective is an い adjective if it ends with an い (minus a few exceptions you need to learn, like きらい and きれい, for example)
When you conjugate い adjectives, you change the い to くない, かった, and くなかった.
To make things polite, you still want to add です to the conjugated (or unconjugated) い adjectives. It is always です, even if it’s past tense, negative, or past negative.
When directly preceding a noun, you’ll want to treat the いadj+noun as a single entity. You can basically think of the whole thing as a noun.

Make sure all those bullet points make sense to you before moving on. There’s also one more worksheet you can go through, with the goal of solidifying everything you’ve worked on up until now.

Adjectives Final Worksheet

By finishing this page, your adjectives, in theory, should be on fairly solid ground. They don’t have to be perfect, but you should understand them and how they all work. You should know the い adjective conjugations by heart, and you should know most of the adjectives from both lists. Also, you should be able to tell the difference between the い and な adjectives, even the exceptions that have い on the end but are actually な adjectives. Essentially, your adjectives should be pretty good, and you should be ready to learn how to do cool things with these adjectives.

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