What ways are there of creating adjectives / adjective-clauses in French?

Question

As a French Learner, I am always very afraid of using adjectives in French. Instead of saying "The tall building", I will always instead choose to say "The building that is tall".

One reason for my fear of adjectives is that there seems to be so many ways to form them in French, and I never know which way is proper.

• Some words by themselves are very clearly adjectives, and when we first learn these words, we are explicitly told to remember these words as adjectives. These words are somewhat easy to use. (e.g. "vert", "sympa", etc)

• However, sometimes a past participle seems to be used as an adjective. For example, when I put "Spoken French is very difficult to understand" into Google Translate, it translated "Spoken French" as "le français parlé". I had no idea that the verb "parler" could be transformed like this into the adjective "spoken".

• And at other times, i think i have seen "de [noun]" or "à [noun]" used as adjectives, but I cannot remember any examples.

So, can anyone tell me all the ways that an adjective (or adjective clause) might be created in French?

Answer 1

From what I have seen, you can use the French past participle, in addition to the present participle, as an adjective.

Par exemple:

En allant au boulot, j'ai vu votre voiture arrêtée au carrefour.

Ce sont des films amusants.

NOTE: The verbs must agree in gender and quantity

Il y avait des voitures arrêtées...

As I am not a native speaker, I can not say with certainty; however, I believe that your example (Le français parlé) would be acceptable. If you were to use it like you say you had been using it with the construnction qui est parlé then you would be using the passive voice.

According to the first example, that is appropriate: here

I think you can also say à l'oral

À l'oral, le français risque d'être difficile à comprendre.