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
Dark blue, light blue... learn how to describe colours in a more specific way!
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.
tummansininen
vaaleansininen
tummanpunainen
vaaleanpunainen
tummanvihreä
vaaleanvihreä
tummanruskea
vaaleanruskea
mintunvihreä
sitruunankeltainen
lohenpunainen
limenvihreä
Exercise 1
Exercise 2
Exercise 3
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