# Colors/Colours



## flipperous

Hello

I find 'colors' a rather confusing aspect of elementary Korean.

Colors are represented both by nouns and verbs?
Or actually in some cases the nouns are a form of the verb combined with -색? 

How are colors used attributively and predicatively?

When should the colour contain 색 when it is used to modify a noun?

When something is a certain color. Are there two possibilities to say this?
차가 파란색이에요 and 차가 파랗다. Are both correct? Which one is used more in speech and writing?

For example 보라색, is there a verb counterpart?

Can you combine a color anding in 색 with a noun using the -의 particle?

Thanks in advance!


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## Environmentalist

Hi, Flipperous.
It's a very good question.
When we predicatively refer to colors, both '~ㄴ색이다' and '~ㅎ다' are correct.
For instance, we can say either '이 꽃은 노란색이다.' or '이 꽃은 노랗다.'
However, the expression '~ㅎ다' is used very limitedly. There are only a few colors that we can describe using '~ㅎ다' such as '빨갛다', '까맣다', '파랗다', '노랗다', '하얗다' and so on.
Honestly, I can only come up with those five colors that can be described that way off hand.
It goes to show that not all colors have their verb counterparts in Korean.

I understand this can be very demotivating part of the Korean-learning process because there are so many exceptions.
We say '이 옷은 보라색이다', but don't say '이 옷은 보랗다.'
I don't know why but we don't say that.
I hope some good other Korean linguisticians could further reply below!


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## yonh

As Environmentalist explained, there are only five colors that can be expressed by native Korean verbs: black, white, red, yellow, and green/blue. The rest colors are described by nouns that are native Korean, Sino-Korean or English loanwords.

There's no significant difference between the verb form and the noun form. Verbs might be preferable to nouns when you want to illustrate something vividly like: 새파랗게 젊은 놈이 왜 그러냐, 추위에 떨어 입술이 시퍼렇다.


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## flipperous

Thanks for your replies. 
This is one of those aspects that makes Korean such an interesting language to learn.


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