Thank you for responding! But I really did mean の-adj! For example, 緑の～, 紫の～. (I think those colors use の... @_@;) I see it in rikaikun, it says "adj-no" as opposed to "adj-na", so I'm guessing it is an adjective where you use の instead of な, but no word for の-adj exists and I got a bit confused...
--Answer
Ahh okay now I understand your question, before I get to answering it I’ll give a little history lesson that will help explain the answer :)
A long long time ago in a country far far away... Back in the day in Japan, there were originally only 4 official colors - Red (あかい), Blue (あおい), White(しろい), and Black(くろい). All of which are considered い adjectives when you study today. So even a shade of orange would be considered red, and green was blue. You still experience the whole “green is blue” thing today when you hear a Japanese person tell you the traffic signal is blue when that shit is clearly green. So, flash forward some years and you start to get new colors like purple(むらさき), green(みどり), yellow(きいろ), and brown （ちゃいろ). These last few colors though are not considered adjectives they are in fact nouns as crazy as that seems. But, there is reason for this, back then you would put ～色 to signify a color so if you wanted a shade of yellow you would say 黄色 where 黄 is actually amber, if you wanted brown 茶色 (tea color), 紫 (purple) comes from a flower’s name that is actually purple and so on and so forth. The reason for brown and yellow having 色 attached and the others not having it is because it was (no joke) deemed awkward to say something like 茶の本 (cha no hon) when describing a book’s color in this case. So that brings us to answering the question~
It is understandable to think these are adjectives in the sense of how English thinks of them. But, in Japanese that is not really the case. So rikai-chan/rickai-kun calls them “no-adj” because when you go to use them you use them as an adjective, but grammar rules mean that because they are a noun they must behave like a noun. As a result you get a の-adjective, but it’s not really an adjective it is just our way of understanding it in English with conjugation and such. To go back to my first example about 「ポールさんの本」, the same rule will apply here because it is a noun. Let’s take a purple book and a red book as an example -
「むらさきの本」 lit. “The book of purple color”
「赤い本」 lit. “The red book.”
The key here is that it is not really an adjective, but a noun describing what this book’s properties are. Also notice the differences in translation. Of course you would still translate the first one to “the purple book”, I put the literal version to help you understand the difference.
I hope I didn’t rock your world too hard and confuse you a ton lol. Most Japanese people don’t even know this history so don’t worry. Let me know if you are still iffy about it.
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