Colours in Finnish
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).
Click and listen to the basic colours in Finnish.
punainen
sininen
keltainen
vihreä
oranssi
musta
valkoinen
ruskea
harmaa
More specific colours in Finnish: Dark blue, light blue... learn how to describe colours!
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
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Now listen to some more Finnish colours.
tummansininen
vaaleansininen
tummanpunainen
vaaleanpunainen
tummanvihreä
vaaleanvihreä
tummanruskea
vaaleanruskea
mintunvihreä
sitruunankeltainen
lohenpunainen
limenvihreä
Exercise 1
Exercise 2
Exercise 3
Finnish colours in sentences
This is how we say a simple thing like “a white shirt”: valkoinen paita = a white shirt
You would need valkoinen paita in a sentence like this:
Tämä valkoinen paita on kiva. = This white shirt is nice.
However, what often happens is with Finnish words that end in -nen is that their stem changes (see my video about Finnish words stems here).
If you want to say, for example “I like this white shirt”, you’ll need a different form: valkoisesta
Pidän tästä valkoisesta paidasta. = I like this white shirt.
- valkoise– is the stem here, and we have added the elative case ending –sta
The reason we can’t use the nominative (the basic form) form, valkoinen is that we’re using the verb pitää, which here has a meaning “to like something”. Pitää makes the words valkoinen and paita change their case to the elative case. The ending –sta sort of completes the meaning of pitää (to learn more about the different meanings of pitää, watch my video about the verb here).
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