I’ve been neglecting my blog for a few days, but hopefully this post will help make up for it…
I was looking online for a good color (色) list in Japanese, but didn’t find anything I was satisfied with, so I made my own, with a visual of the colors along with the kanji and hirigana, and I’m posting it here if anyone can also find it useful.
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September 16, 2009 at 6:30 am
Squimpleton
This is a pretty sweet list. Very organized. However how can you tell from the list if you need to add “iro” (like ki + iro for yellow) and when you don’t (like aka) ?
September 16, 2009 at 8:24 am
becomingjapanese
You can add “iro” to any of the colors or leave it off it depends on the situation. So you can say “aka” or “akairo” or you can just say “ki”, like if you were listing the colors of traffic lights, you would say, “aka, ki, ao” but if you were saying “remon (レモン)” you would more likely say “remoniro” (レモンいろ) to distinguish from the fruit.
Great question! Thanks!
September 17, 2009 at 8:08 am
tokyo5
Usually “-iro” is added as a suffix in cases when the color is named after a noun (such as “momo-iro”, “cha-iro”, “mizu-iro”, “hai-iro”, etc).
You don’t usually hear “aka-iro”, “midori-iro”, “kuro-iro”, etc
(BTW, grey can also be called “nezumi-iro”.)
September 16, 2009 at 8:17 pm
felishkulitz
So far this is the most elaborate list of Japanese colors I found. Thanks for making this. This is a really good list. The shades, kanji, hiragana and even the organization makes it nice to look at and easy to learn. I am a visual learner and with the help of images like this chart, I can remember them better.
September 17, 2009 at 8:09 am
tokyo5
Nice chart.
I thought you should’ve included 「銀」 and 「金」.
September 17, 2009 at 12:05 pm
becomingjapanese
I found out after I was done that kids in japan learn 36-72 color names, So I may make a more detailed chart at some point.
September 20, 2009 at 3:19 am
Anuan
Hey thanks for the colour list. Any possibility of adding the romanji to each one?
Informative blog. thanks
September 20, 2009 at 3:57 am
becomingjapanese
I considered adding romanji, but there was the obvious space issue, and I created it to help with learning the kanji.
If you are serious about learning Japanese, then focus on learning the hirigana and katakana, it’s really the first step to learning the language, and a necessity. For my own learning process, I try to avoid romanji as much as possible and do all my note taking using the kata. It’s not that hard to get the hang of, once you use it regularly.
Ganbatte!!