How to Use Adjectives

It's time to cover adjectives -- those words that describe nouns. Let's start off with the Urdu word for "good":

• acha = good

In most cases, we put the adjective in front of the noun that it describes:

• acha larka = good boy

But as with English, we can push the adjective to come after the noun in some sentences:

• Yeh acha larka hai = This is a good boy

In Urdu, adjectives that end in "a" have separate forms for masculine, feminine, and plural nouns. As you've already seen above (in the "acha larka" example), such adjectives stay the same when describing masculine objects. When describing feminine objects, however, the ending "a" is replaced with an "i":

• achi larki = good girl

Looks familiar, right? When we learned about masculine and feminine nouns, we saw that nouns that end in "a" are typically masculine and nouns that end in "i" are typically feminine. Taking this idea further, you can probably guess what the masculine plural version of "acha" should look like:

• ache larke = good boys

The feminine plural version of the adjective is the same as the feminine singular version:

• achi larkian = good girls

Not all adjectives have multiple forms though. Adjectives that don't end in "a" have only one form, regardless of the gender and number of objects that it refers to. Take the adjective "mashoor", for example:

• mashoor aadmi = famous man / famous men
• mashoor aurat = famous woman
• mashoor auraten = famous women

We'll build our vocabulary of adjectives in our next lesson, and get some practice using them. See you then!