Comment faire/avoir des hortensias bleues.

Hello Leigh,

I corrected your writing in French. I know how much the rules of french grammar is difficult about the colors. Even the French people have difficulties to give correctly the colors in number and gender.

In French, most of the colors (red, green, blue, yellow...) agree with the number (singular or plural) and the gender (masculine or feminine - yes, French are poetic people and give a gender to the nouns for the biggest misfortune of the foreigners) of the noun. For example, flower is a feminine noun in French, so in general all the adjectives attached to the noun become feminine. Same rule for the number, if you have a noun in the plural, its adjectives are in the plural. Therefore, "I like the blue flowers" is translated in French : "J'aime les fleurs bleues". In English, the noun concentrates all the marks of the number and of the gender while the adjective is invariable. However, in French, the adjective agree with the noun in number and gender. You must know the gender of the noun to agree with its adjective. The mark of the feminine in French is -e. In general (the most of the cases), the mark of the plural in French is -s (sometimes -x, for example, a cabbage = un chou, cabbages = des choux).

"The adjectives of color agree with the noun in number and gender" is the general rule of French grammar about the adjectives of color. There are exceptions.

If the adjective of color is also a noun who designate a thing, then the adjective of color is invariable !

I like the blue chairs = J'aime les chaises bleues. You can see in French an grammatical agreement between the feminine noun in the plural "chaises" and the adjective of color bleues which ends with an -es (the mark of the feminine and the plural in French) because the blue in French is a word which designates only a color, so we applicates the general rule of the adjective of color.

I like the brown chairs = J'aime les chaises marron.

You can see here that the adjective "marron" which means the color brown doesn't agree with the word "chaises" which is a feminine noun in the plural because in French, "marron" designates a color (brown) but a thing too, the fruit of the chataigner (a maroon). The French people have one word to designate two different things (a color and a fruit) whereas the English people have a word for each entry (brown and marroon). In fact, marron is a noun which is used as an adjective without it is considerated as a pure adjective.

Comment faire les hortensias bleus