I’m finding one of the hardest things for me atm, is remembering which items need な vs だ after a noun or adjective.
Are there any tricks to distinguishing between these two?
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The way I would explain it would be like this.
な and だ are the same thing. な is just the attributive form of だ. The only reason there are “na adjectives” is because certain nouns can be applied to another to describe it (i.e what an adjective typically does)
If you take 元気 this is a noun, but it can be used adjectivally, meaning you can say
学生は元気だ - The student(s) is/are lively (healthy/energetic)
This was used as a plain noun
or
元気な学生 - A lively student.
This was used adjectivally.
The only difference in terms of structure is whether you were directly modifying the other noun （学生) or whether you were saying something about it as the predicate.
You use だ when you are saying “it is A” you use な when you are modifying the other noun.
Certain nouns can’t be used adjectivally in that way, I think its more helpful to view this as a logical pretense, not a grammatical one. You don’t use 学生 with な ever, because you wouldn’t be attributing the quality of student onto something else. You would use の if you wanted to do that, however that gets into another discussion.
I could probably do a better job at explaining it, sorry about that. If you have any specific examples of words or sentences I would be happy to tell you my thoughts on them.
You will likely pick up on this in the future and then will begin to ask a question more about の vs な and I would encourage you to check out this article, it helped me. The Guide to Na-Adjectives and "So-Called" No-Adjectives
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