I'm having trouble with colors. Dictionaries, online translators and even Koreans have all given me different names for colors. I have heard that some of the names are more general than others, but I can't seem to pinpoint them. Can anyone help and tell me the most general equivalent in Korean of:
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Purple
White
Black
Brown
Gray
I highlighted the words in their color for the ease of translation, hopefully no no one's co-teachers are color blind. The color white is there too, hiding...is it most common to call it 하얀, 휜or 백색? As for turquoise, burgundy, crimson, and teal...I'll ask about them later.
Hanja
These are some of the colors in Hanja. This is actually Chinese, but the same characters for colors are (or were) used in Korean. Ask your co-teachers to pronounce them.
白 - White
赤 - Red (*The Japanese word for red is "Akai", which uses this character. However, the Chinese word "Hong" uses this character 紅, which is "Kurenai" in Japanese, meaning "crimson." It's possible that they could actually simply mean the same thing since there are a several synonymous or obselete characters for the same words.)
黃 - Yellow
青 - Blue
緑 - Green
黑 - Black
색깔 = color --hope this helps!
Red - 빨간색
Orange- 주황색 or 오랜지색
Yellow- 노란색
Green- 초록색
Blue- 파란색
Purple- 보라색
White- 하얀색
Black- 검정색 or 까만색 (this is more slang)
Brown- 갈색
Gray- 회색
pink is 부농 색
this won't really help...
So this won't really help to answer your specific question, but it may be of interest to you that color terms can differ in what spectra they cover in different languages, which can often be a source of great confusion!
This is a quick thing I found outlining some of the research along those lines. Although this doesn't go into it, the reason I mention this is that while both Japanese and Korean currently fall into the category of languages with 11 color terms, I seem to recall that they were 8(or 9?)-termed languages until the Chinese gave them some extra terms. I'm too lazy to try to find the article(s) I read that in...