How to Learn the Japanese Adjective Order

Video Transcript

YUU ASAKURA: The same as in English, you can use as many adjectives you need to describe something, and order is not that different. Let us look at the example. So I wrote down: My new long white dress. Yeah. And so in Japanese it goes: "Watashino atarashii (atarashii means new) nagai (means long) shiroi (white) doresu (the Japanese version of dress)." And here, you can just use the order of the words from English just as it is. I know the rule is usually it is "my or this or that." It has to come at the top of the list, but you can pretty much list all the adjectives. And there is no golden rule. If it is talking about material, it gets closer to a noun, so that's the only point. But other than that, you can just list the adjectives as you like. So let's practice with: his heavy, thick book. "His" is "kare no." Heavy is "omoi" in Japanese, and "thick" is "atsui." It is the same pronunciation as hot, but it uses a different "kanji," Chinese character, so it is a different meaning. And "book" is "hon." Yes. So it means "kare no omoi atsui hon." So you can just list the adjective as much as you like. And you may realize that all the adjectives in Japanese ends with E, so it's easy to distinguish if the word is adjective or not. If it does not end with E, chances are it is not.

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