Actions that are easy or hard to do

This is a short easy lesson on how to transform verbs into adjectives describing whether that action is easy or difficult to do. Basically, it consists of changing the verb into the stem and adding 「やすい」 for easy and 「にくい」 for hard. The result then becomes a regular i-adjective. Pretty easy, huh?

Using 「～やすい、～にくい」 to describe easy and difficult actions
  • To describe an action as being easy, change the verb to the stem and add 「やすい」. To describe an action as being difficult, attach 「にくい」 to the stem.
  • 例）　ru-verb: 食べる → 食べやすい
  • 例）　u-verb: しゃべる → しゃべり → しゃべりにくい

The result becomes a regular i-adjective.
Positive Negative
Non-Past 食べにくい 食べにくくない
Past 食べにくかった 食べにくくなかった

Examples

  1. この字は読みにくい
    This hand-writing is hard to read.
  2. カクテルはビールより飲みやすい。
    Cocktails are easier to drink than beer.
  3. 部屋が暗かったので、見にくかった。
    Since the room was dark, it was hard to see.

As an aside: Be careful with 「見にくい」 because 「醜い」 is a rarely used adjective meaning, "ugly". I wonder if it's just coincidence that "difficult to see" and "ugly" sound exactly the same?

Of course, you can always use some other grammatical structure that we have already learned to express the same thing using appropriate adjectives such as 「難しい」、「易しい」、 「簡単」、「容易」、etc. The following two sentences are essentially identical in meaning.

  1. あの肉は食べにくい。
    That meat is hard to eat.
  2. あの肉を食べるのは難しい。
    The thing of eating that meat is difficult.

Variations of 「～にくい」 with 「～がたい」 and 「～づらい」

The kanji for 「にくい」 actually comes from 「難い」 which can also be read as 「かたい」. As a result, you can also add a voiced version 「～がたい」 as a verb suffix to express the same thing as 「にくい」. 「にくい」 is more common for speaking while 「がたい」 is more suited for the written medium. 「にくい」 tends to be used for physical actions while 「がたい」 is usually reserved for less physical actions that don't actually require movement. However, there seems to be no hard rule on which is more appropriate for a given verb so I suggest searching for both versions in google to ascertain the popularity of a given combination. You should also always write the suffix in hiragana to prevent ambiguities in the reading.

Examples

  1. 彼との忘れがたい思い出を大切にしている。
    I am treating importantly the hard to forget memories of and with him.
  2. とても信じがたい話だが、本当に起こったらしい。
    It's a very difficult to believe story but it seems (from hearsay) that it really happened.

Yet another, more coarse variation of stem + 「にくい」 is to use 「づらい」 instead which is a slightly transformed version of 「辛い」（つらい）. This is not to be confused with the same 「辛い」（からい）, which means spicy!

Examples

  1. 日本語は読みづらいな。
    Man, Japanese is hard to read.
  2. 待ち合わせは、分かりづらい場所にしないでね。
    Please don't pick a difficult to understand location for the meeting arrangement.