You know what adverbs are, right? Adverbs modify verbs. In English, adverbs are words like “slowly” in “John slowly walked down the street.” or “creatilvey” in “My wife creatilvely folded the paper into a crane.” Students of Japanese tend to learn one adjective, the adjective totemo and then move on Kanji or keigo or something else. I guess the reson for this Japanese adverbs are a little confusing. So let’s learn a few adjectives to put a little wasabi in your Japanese
In Japanese there are two kinds of adverbs. There are adverbs and then modfied adjectives that play the role of adverbs.The first kind are words that have always been adverbs, and the second are adjectives that are placed in a particular inflection so as to act adverbially. You will understand. In fact you are probably already using these adjectival adverbs.
General adverbs
The first type of adverbials are mostly quantifiers. Words such as sukoshi, meaning “a little bit”, zutto, meaning “very much”/”throughout” or tokidoki, meaning “sometimes”.
Here is a list of a few more;
Daibu - greatly
Totemo - very
Taihen - very, awfully
Adjectival adverbs
The second type can be constructed out of either verbal adjectives, or noun adjectives. However, the way they are inflected to become adverbs is different for the two.
Verbal Adjectives
Change verbal adjectives to the ku form and then it can be used as an adverb. For instance, the verbal adjective hayai, meaning “early” can be made an adverb by dropping the i and adding ku, resulting in hayaku. This can then be used with for instance the verb for “waking up”, okiru: hayaku okiru - to wake up early.
Here are a few more;
hidoku - appallingly
sugoku - terribly, amazingly
yoku - well
tsuyoku - strongly
Noun adjjectives
Noun adjectives can be turned into adjectives by instead of adding na as suffix, adding ni as suffix. For instance, kirei is a noun adjective meaning “pretty”, kireini is an adverb meaning pretty. If we pair this with the verb for “to split”, wakeru we get niwakeru meaning “to cleanly split” (such as a piece of cake spilt among children)
nazen ni - completely
amari ni excessively
migoto ni - astonishingly
hijyou ni - extraordinarily
yakeni - horribly
I hope this helps. Now you should know a few more adjectives than just tetomo.
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