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- "blue"
"blue"
Translation:あお
29 Comments
There's a joke in Japanese: What was Michael Jackson's favourite colour? あお!
It is more of a verbal joke. You can get the right intonation if you think of the song that goes, "あお! I feel good. Nananananananana. Like I knew that I would."
Yes, that one isn't a Michael Jackson one, but it's the first thing that occurred to me that had that particular intonation of the あお. ^_^
That would be an adjective, just the colour would be blue (あお) but as an adjective it would indeed be あおい
I believe green and blue were once seen as the same color, and they were both represented with "Ao". Could be wrong, though.
You're right, though I would say that what we call green and blue were considered shades of the same color 青 (あお), rather than being "seen as the same color".
Japanese now has a word for green, 緑 (みどり), but according to a quick Google, that only really came into common usage after WWII. Interestingly, Japanese traffic lights still use blue to signify "go", and they are described as ao.
Yeah, you're much more likely to encounter this word as the kanji 青, though it is commonly stylized as あお on book/anime/manga/movie titles or shop signs etc.
青 is the noun, meaning the color blue (sometimes also 青色 ao iro), while 青い is the adjective form used when describing something as being blue.
I stumbled on japanese learning app and they taught me that blue is "aoi". which one is correct?
That is when it is used as an adjective, this is when it is used as a noun. Both are correct
“Blue—one of the four traditional colors originally established in the Japanese language along with red, black and white—historically encompassed items that other cultures would describe as green,” resulting in a kind of “grue” or “bleen.” Objects (e.g. apples) or persons (e.g. novices) that would be “green” in English are referred to in Japanese as being “blue” instead — and this includes traffic lights."
