掲示板 Forums - What does な mean?

Hello I'm not sure if this is the answer you're looking for, but I'll give explaining it a try and if this isn't what you're looking for, then you can just ignore this all :)

Some of the things I'll be talking about can be found under menu> Resources> Japanese Basics> Adjective basics. I'm not very good at explanations, so I really recommend checking it out. (The lesson doesn't take very long and explains it much better than I do)

To begin with the basics -- there are 2 kinds of adjectives:

Adjectives that end with -い (ex. 赤い, akai, red)

And adjectives that end with -な (ex. 有名な, yuumei na, famous) This is the kind of adjective your question is about, but let's look at both kinds to compare them:

A. When placed in the following structure: "the dog is red" and "the daughter is famous", い-adjectives will keep their last い, meanwhile な-adjectives will drop the な. So these examples will become:

犬 は 赤いです and 娘 は 有名 です

B. Now there's the structure you showed in your example sentence, which are built like "the red dog" and "the famous daughter". Here, both the い-adjectives and な-adjectives will keep their final い and な. See the following examples:

赤い 犬 and 有名な 娘

Both kinds of adjectives are translated the same way, as you can see. Each adjective is either a い-adjective or a な-adjective, so you simply have to learn them and know which is which. I don't know whether a pattern exists to determine what kind of adjective you're dealing with, except for when they're used in a sentence (-い, -な, or ending on nothing, like structure A with な as you can see in the given example).

About the part with な/なあ being used at the end of a sentence as a kind of expression similar to ですね, I'm not really sure. I believe it can be used for both kinds since it's an expression, not the same な I've been talking about. But then again, I'm not completely sure about that.

I'm only an amateur Japanese learner, so I hope it was understandable/helpful. I do want to say that Duolingo lacks at the explanation-part in languages (speaking from experience), so I really recommend checking out the other lessons in the Resources> Japanese Basics on Renshuu!

@.Milo you are too good at explanations.

@滝沢パイナップル The “meaning” of な is to convert a noun into an adjective. It is interesting to contrast な with の in this respect.

Just a bit of trivia...

i-adjectives are called 形容詞（けいようし) in jp which literally translates to "description word" or "modification word".

na-adjectives are called 形容動詞（けいようどうし）. In the dictionary it's translated as "adjectival noun" but the literal sense of the word is "description/modification verb". Now why is that?
です is a relatively new invention. In the middle ages the verb なり was used instead. So in order to create an adjective from a noun they would add なり to it. なり, however, fell out of fashion and only remains to this day in its shortened form な as part of na-adjectives. You can still see its origin as a verb in the fact that it is inflected, as in 有名になりたい = "I want to become famous" where the な has changed into に.

Thank you for sharing @Karlla! I'm a big language nerd so that's really neat!