Japanese Colours

Colours are one of the first things you are taught when learning a second language such as Japanese. The Japanese colours are easy to learn and teach when considering the vast amount of resources available out there to help you! A number of Japanese colours share a similar pronunciation as English as a few shades never had names in Japanese until relatively recently when English became taught in mainstream, schools around Japan. A simple example would be pink (pinku) and orange (oranji).

Japanese colours

The Japanese word for colour is iro (色). One thing that may confuse a English speaker is that some colours change when they are used as an adjective.

What I like to do when teaching Japanese colours is teach the Japanese version of the rainbow song. I put together a Japanese graphic useful for teaching this song in Japanese below.

Colours practice game

A fantastic game I found to help practice the colours in japanese is this game built by Nihongo o Narau. First you press one of the three buttons at the bottom, kanji, kana or romaji (I usually use romaji for young students), then press ‘start’. You then have 30 seconds to read the colour word that pops up in whatever text you chose, and press the correct colour button. A perfect score would be 11/11. The game produces some fun sounds.

More advanced colours

For those of you seeking a bigger challenge than the above colours of the rainbow, the table below shares a few new colours and information on more exotic colours like light blue and green.