Japanese Adjectives

This is a companion tutorial to my Japanese Verbs, and I trust that it will also become a concise and convenient resource for those learning or reviewing Japanese.

Please have an English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary and notebook handy as you study. As new words are introduced, use your dictionary to learn or check their meanings, and make a word list in your notebook to add new vocabulary to. It's a proven fact that the process of looking up and writing vocabulary will help the learning process, along with regular reviewing.

Please see A Bit of the Language for pronunciation guides and other relevant information.

Please note: In order to avoid technical explanations, only the simplest and most general translations of words are given. Also, romaji (romanized Japanese words) used herein are written in their true, romanized form: elongated vowels are shown as such, etc.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction to Japanese Adjectives
  2. Plain Positive and Plain Negative
  3. Colors
  4. Adjectives suki, kirai, hoshii, jouzu and heta
  5. Adverbial Forms
  6. Conditional Forms
  7. The Te Form + mo
  8. Plain Past
  9. Adjectives with sou and sugiru
  10. Adjective Modifiers