Friday, June 1, 2018

Korean Colours

watch the lesson here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vouAKTkPSKI&feature=youtu.be
Colours are, actually, a lot more difficult to use than you would expect. There multiple ways of using them. This lesson will be an over simplification. I will just introduce you to one way of using colour words and get you familiar with the vocabulary. But first some review.
In the previous adjective videos we learned that adjectives can be treated like verbs. You can conjugate them to mean "is adjective" for example "is good". The conjugated adjective has the verb 'to be' built into it. You can also use adjectives the way we do in English placing them right infront of the noun they are describing. To make that form of the adjective you have to conjugate them by adding 은-eun to adjective roots that end in consonants and -nㄴ to adjective roots that end in vowels and 는-neun to adjective roots that end in -있.
The colour words I'm going to teach you today, on the other hand, are not like other adjectives. They donot have the verb 'to be' built into them.
Let's not waste anytime. Here is a list of all the colours.
red 빨간색
orange 주황색
yellow 노란색
green 녹색
blue 파란색
purple 보라색
pink 분홍색
brown 갈색
black 검은색, 검정색, 까만색
white 흰색, 백색, 하얀색
grey회색
Notice that all of these words end in 색 saek. Saek means color. So in Korean you don't just say something is red, you say it is red colour
Like I said: colours do not have the verb to be built into them like the other adjectives do.
So if we want to say something is a color, for example, the ribbon is red, then we need to add is at the end of the sentence... like so
리본 _____이에요.
We'll keep things simple in this lesson and just use the polite form. (It works the same with formal and casual)
and then we fill in the blank with a colour word like red for example
리본 빨간색이에요.
Unlike other adjectives these colour words don't have "is/am/are/" built into them. You might say these Korean colour words have more in common with English adjectives than other Korean adjectives do.

You do not need to add is/am/are when you are using the color word in a sentence with another verb in it. for example I see a red ribbon. That would be
저는 빨간색 리본 봐요.
It should be clear that since there is no 'is' in the English sentence there will be no i-e-yo in the Korean sentence.
Let's take another look at the list of colours. We already noted that the all have saek at the end... is there ever a time when they don't need the saek? YES. But, like I said, this video is an over-simplification I just wanted to show you one form of the color words and how to use them.
If you always use the saek then you won't go wrong.

You see we have 3 different blacks and 3 different whites. but the most popular ones are 검은색 for black and 흰색 for white.
red 빨간색
orange 주황색
yellow 노란색
green 녹색
blue 파란색
purple 보라색
pink 분홍색
brown 갈색
black 검은색, 검정색, 까만색
white 흰색, 백색, 하얀색
grey회색


watch the lesson here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vouAKTkPSKI&feature=youtu.be