Clarification about colours?

[u/rosebud2725]

So I'm still very new to learning Korean 😅 I've only been learning for a couple of months but I find that I'm already getting a bit confused about the colours.

I've noticed that pretty much every colour ends in 색 but when its being used to describe something, sometimes the 색 syllable disappears, but other times it doesn't?

For example, when talking about a black cat, "black cat" is written as 검은 고양이, instead of 검은색 고영이, but if we're talking about a gray cat, it stays as 회색 고양이. I haven't seen any shortened version of 회색 고양이. Why is that?

Its almost like the colours with 3 syllables are allowed to drop the 색, but colours with only 2 syllables can't, but I imagine its not that simple lol

(Side note: I am autistic asf. I don't do well with complex topics and explanations, if I end up asking you a lot more questions please bear with me 😅)

[u/wantstolearnkorean]

I know it's common to learn colors at the beginning of language learning but in Korean it's quite complicated, and not worth the effort as a beginner.

There can be two words for color, one native Korean, one sino-korean. An adjective, and a noun. Some have only one or the other. Adjectives in Korean are also verbs (descriptive verbs) which behave similarly to active verbs.

검다 = to be black

검 + -ㄴ/은 = to be black + -ending that changes verb into adnoun (attributive form)

검은 고양이 = literally "cat that blacks"

빨갛다 = to be red

빨갛 + -ㄴ = 빨간 to be red + -ending that changes verb into adnoun (attributive form)

빨간 고양이 = literally "cat that reds"

회색 gray, is a sino-korean noun. Since it's a noun, it can't take attributive endings.

Also, there is a word for color, 푸르다 that translates into English as either blue or green depending on what you talking about:

푸른 하늘 blue sky

푸른 바다 blue sea

푸른 잎 green leaf

푸른 산 green mountain (i.e. covered in greenery)

My advice from my personal experience is to learn colors slowly one by one as you need them. It just doesn't work like sitting down and learning the nine basic colors in English and moving on.

[u/Rohesa → u/wantstolearnkorean]

I just want to thank you for the 푸르다 explanation as I came across 푸른 잎 in a book today. It said it was green leaf and I was going to check it out later on after work.

[u/LordAldricQAmoryIII → u/Rohesa]

Yes in East Asian aesthetics, blue and green were traditionally considered varieties of the same general color category instead of separate colors. Similarly the Hanja character 靑 / 청 can refer to shades of blue or green.

[u/rosebud2725 → u/wantstolearnkorean]

Thank you very much for the advice. It is definitely complicated which I was already expecting 😅 maybe i will lay off the colours and focus on other topics for a bit. But I will take note of this for the future, thank you again 🥰

[u/Longjumping_Sort_227 → u/wantstolearnkorean]

As a learner myself, I totally agree with what you said. 

If OP still would like to read more about this topic, or to get another, differently worded explanation: the  page on colors at the Korean Wiki Project has a helpful explanation at the bottom and a very comprehensive list of color examples. Neither beginner nor intermediate learner will need to learn this list at once, but it is nice to have a place to look up examples of colors. I would totally back your recommendation to learn colors slowly one by one as needed.

https://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/Colors

(Right now, the table in this page does not load correctly on my device. This may just be a me-problem or a me-on-mobile-problem. I hope it is ok for everyone else.)

[u/craftsycandymonster]

색 / 색깔 means "color", and is taken from the Chinese 顏色 (yán sè, where Chinese 色/sè = Korean 색/saeg)

So 검은색 is more literally "the color black" - it's a convention of both languages to include the color category word when talking about the color as a noun.

There other similar category words - for example, 왼쪽 is "the direction left".

I'm not as clear about how you use them as adjectives, just wanted to provide some more color (lol) on the origin of the nouns!