I’m slightly confused over a few things. first of all I’m unsure of when you extend an o vowel with お instead of う?
My second question is about the word sukunai.
Why is the reading sukunai in spite of the kanji’s kunyomi being suko? From my understanding nai negates the noun or adjective it is attached to, does suku mean something different than suko that it is being negated?
Both suko and suku should be ok.
Sukoshi and sukunai, that is.
You just have to memorize all the words with おお. It’s an exception.
To add to @polv’s response. The おお vs おう question has already been discussed here. But in short as polv said, they’re all kun’yomi reading exceptions (and there’s very few of them compared to おう)
And to add up to the 少し vs 少ない : they’re not the same Part of Speech. The first one is an adverb where as the second is an い-adjective (with 多い 「おおい」as antonym)
Yes, wanikani teaches suko, but if you look a little further at a dictionary entry - すこし - Jisho.org, it lists both すく and すこ as kunyomi readings.
少ない => い-adjective and 少し => adverb
Don’t think of 少ない as a negative, just think of it as the way it is. There are other words like it such as つまらない (boring, dull), 危ない (あぶない, dangerous).
To negate them, they still follow the normal rule for い adjectives: remove the い and add くない.
i.e. 少ない => 少なくない
I just want to make this as clear as possible. There are words which end, and include, ない naturally. 少ない is not the negative, nor opposite, of すく. It is just a normal word which happens to end in ない.
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