~nikui ~yasui and double negatives

Konnichiwa minnasan! So Ive recently come back to a grammar point that I learned a while ago, and it brought up a question. with the verb postfixes ~yasui and ~nikui (meaning easy to do and hard to do respectively) can you use/conjugate them into thier negative and past negative forms? And more importantly is that even used in common Japanese. For example tabenikui: difficult to eat -> tabenikukunai: not difficult to eat kakiyasukatta: it was easy to write -> kakiyasukunakatta: it was not easy to write In english I know I use this kind of grammar frequently, but I was curious if its the same in japanese, or would the speaker just use the opposite combination of yasui/nikui instead of using the negative? e.g. hashiriyasui, instead of using: hashirinikukunai (easy to run, instead of using: not difficult to run) Thanks for any help, Dan P.S. sorry the international language package isnt working on my computer, and I cant type any hiragana/katakana. Hope my examples arent too difficult to read.

Hi there, Yasui/nikui are auxiliary adjectives. When you add the -yasui or -nikui to the stem of the verb, they function as adjectives. Hence, you can conjugate them in all the ways that you would conjugate an adjective, eg. present, past, neg, past neg., conditional, adverbial, te-form. So, yes, I believe you can conjugate them in the ways you mentioned. Eg. Hashiru>hashirinikui>hashirinikukunai desu/hashirinikuku arimasen. As to whether or not they are normally used, I don't know. Personally though, which is easier to say? Hashirinikukunakatta? or hashiriyasukatta desu? Please correct me if I am wrong.

I use this almost daily in my conversations with people, so yeah it is commonly used. I believe you can conjugate "yasui" or "nikui" so as to make it in past tense and etc. When I learned this neat little combo, I was like "Cool, now I can say something is hard/easier without sounding too abrassive".

デレクさん、ありがとう！

みなさんこんにちは！ You can definetely say 走りにくくない to say "it's not difficult to run" or 食べにくくない to say "it's not difficult to eat". Of course, you can also use the -yasui ending and say 食べやすい "It's easy to eat" - but both forms are used in everyday Japanese language. -Sayaka ;)

thank you for this lesson.. i learned so much vocabulary...