Part of Speech: Na & No Adjectives

Hello mates I am a level 10 adventurer, nice to meet you!
Without further introductioks from my side let us dive right into the subject of this thread (Ah, a direct fella, I like that!)

While doing my lessons and reviews I’ve noticed there are these terms “No-” and “Na Adjective” in the Part of Speech section of the info. Now there are also others for example the Suru Verb but I’ve learned the meaning if those. Suru Verb means the word can be transformed into a verb by adding ‘suru’ at the end (right?). But with these Na- and No Adjectives I can’t see or understand their meaning.

If you’d be so kind, would you teach me what they mean? Are they similar to the Suru Verb; added to the end the noun becomes an adjective? Are there examples just like with the Suru Verb there’s the vocab ‘to drive’ “untensuru” (I hope that’s correct)?

A great thank-you to all of you in advance! Or should I say… Alligator! (heh)

Yeah, if you add な at the end of a な adjective, it can modify a noun.

好き + 色
好きな色 (literally “liked color”, usually thought of as “favorite color”)

A の adjective works the same way
英語 + 本
英語の本 (an English [language] book)

BTW, shouldn’t their usage be clear in the example sentences? At least some anyway.

Also, I’m not 100% certain of this part, but I believe that something like 英語 can appear with の after it in cases where it is just [noun + の] and not [の adjective + の].

For instance, 英語の先生, to me, would just be the usage of a 英語 as a noun. It’s a “teacher of English”.

But in the case of 英語の本, the book isn’t about English necessarily, it is an “English book”, it’s written in English.

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Yeah, it’s never been made entirely clear to me as to precisely what a の-adjective is. Looking at example sentences, it seems to refer to nouns that modify other nouns more often than not.

Monolingual dictionaries don’t seem to have any special designation for them, so I wonder if it’s just anything that often gets used that way.

For -na
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/adjectives#The_na-adjective

For -no (basically: they are just normal nouns that are normally translated as adjectives)

[You won’t learn grammar by staring at WK ;-)]

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So maybe that designation is just one that I manufactured to account for the spottiness of labeling things as の adjectives in E-J dictionaries.

Like, 理科 is listed as just a noun, but obviously you can have a 理科の本 or a 理科の先生. But at least with 本 example, the difference is clear to me that it’s a book “about” science, not made with science or something like the 英語の本 can mean.

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For me, it’s easier to group these a “noun modifiers” with adjectives being a type of modifier. Noun combinations as adjectives in this context sounds incorrect as there is no literal adjective. You can modify nouns with clauses/verbs but these are not adjectives either, just different noun modification:

Ex. 男が読んでいる本は面白い。

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