BondLingo Learn Japanese

Adjectives in Japanese: An introduction

Describing everything under the sun has never sounded so… educational.

What are Japanese Adjectives?

When learning how to make proper Japanese sentences, we must know the different parts of a sentence. For today’s blog, we will focus on one of the main parts of good sentence structure. Japanese adjectives (形容詞: “Keiyoushi”) are no different to English adjectives in terms of function. Similarly, they are words used to describe the general state, and even quantity of nouns or objects. Not to be confused with adverbs, adjectives do not describe verbs EVER.

A few common examples of English adjectives are “cute”, “handsome”, “tall” and “heavy”. For Japanese adjectives, however, we can classify them into 2 main types. We have the na-keiyoushi(na- adjectives) and the i-keiyoushi(i – adjectives). We will discuss them further into this blog.

When do we use Japanese Adjectives?

Adjectives are mainly used when you would like to elaborate and describe what something looks like, smells like, feels like, sounds like..anything that can be felt by your senses and your feelings. Although adjectives seem to overlooked compared to nouns and verbs, they are actually quite important and spice up a sentence. Look at it this way, if (god forbid) your pet gets lost, the best way to inform people and find your pet is to describe what your pet looks like and how it interacts with people. Without adjectives, life would be pretty dull, literally.

Where can we find them in a sentence?

As Japanese language students, making conversation in Japanese is almost always a sure sign of progress. Using adjectives correctly will definitely increase your fluency. Much similarly to adjectives in English, Japanese adjectives have the function of describing or talking about a noun. Because of this, adjectives are usually found before or after a noun, depending on the sentence structure. A few examples can be found below.

Na-Keiyoushi

Na-keiyoushi or Na-adjectives, are very easy to learn because it has the same conjugation rules as nouns. One of the main differences they have is how instead of は or が, we use な after this adjective, hence getting it’s name “na-keiyoushi”. A few examples can be found below. Be careful with a few adjectives though. Not all adjectives ending with an い is an i-keiyoushi(i-adjective), it can be a na-keiyoushi! We’ll put an asterisk on a few of the examples below!

(Noun) wa/ga + (Na adjective) desu.

かれは元気です。
 Kare wa genki desu.
 He is lively/energetic/healthy.

(Na adjective) na + (Noun) desu.

元気な人です。
 Genki na hito desu.
 He/she’s a lively/energetic/healthy person.

The different forms/tenses

As the title says, we will talk about the different forms and tenses of adjectives. We have the present tense which is the state of a word, in this case, an adjective, in the present or current time or something that is habitually performed (desu form) and past tense which talks about previous state, since we are talking about adjectives. We will also be giving examples of positive and negative forms of adjectives.

かんたん (Easy)
Kantan

Positive

Negative

へん (Hen)
Strange

Positive

Negative

*きらい (Kirai)
Don’t like/ Hate

Positive casual

Negative casual

しずか (Shizuka)
Silent/Quiet

Positive casual

Negative casual

Learn Japanese Adjectives with BondLingo?

Study in Japan?

Recommend