Colours are adjectives. And like a lot of Finnish adjectives, many (but not all) of the colours end in -nen.

Read and listen to the colours in Finnish here (scroll down for the audio).

colors in Finnish

Click and listen to the basic colours in Finnish.

Dark blue, light blue... learn how to describe colours in a more specific way!

Colours in Finnish

Sometimes you may want to describe a colour. Light blue, dark blue, mint green and so on. Usually, the most natural-sounding way to do this is to add a word in the genitive case (the ending ‘-n’) in the front.

vaalea = light (the genitive: vaalean)

vaaleansininen = light blue

tumma = dark (the genitive: tumman)

tummanvihreä = dark vihreä

taivas = the sky (the genitive: taivaan)

taivaansininen

lohi = salmon (the genitive: lohen)

lohenpunainen = salmon red (in English this is usually called salmon pink)

minttu = mint (the genitive: mintun)

mintunvihreä

Now listen to some more Finnish colours.

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

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