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This construction of real followed by an adjective happens a great deal. If you look for the word real in COCA followed by an adjective, which is something that’s real easy to do, you will find that the top ten adjectives that follow real immediately are:

So as I said, it happens — and not just a little, either: it happens a lot. The OED describes it, then COCA gives you a feel for the common adjectives which the adverb real collocates with.

This construction of real followed by an adjective happens a great deal. If you look for the word real in COCA followed by an adjective, which is something that’s real easy to do, you will find that the top ten adjectives that follow real immediately are:

So as I said, it happens — and not just a little, either: it happens a lot. The OED describes it, then COCA gives you a feel for the common adjectives which the adverb real collocates with.

Whatever you want to call real, it does not fit into neat and tidy categories. See also the question What’s an adverb?

Whatever you want to call real, it does not fit into neat and tidy categories. See also the question What’s an adverb?

As an adverb, it can only intensify other modifiers, and usually adjectives at that: it does not intensify verbs. You cannot *real hope for something, but you can be real hopeful — at least in some dialects.

The original Teut. adjs. in -lîko- were compounds of the

sb. *lîkom appearance, form, body (see lich). Thus *mannlîko- (‘manly’) means etymologically ‘having the appearance or form of a man’; gôðolîko- (‘goodly’) ‘having a good appearance or form’, or ‘having the appearance or form of what is good’. The primitive force of the suffix may therefore be rendered by ‘having the appearance or form indicated by the first element of the word’; but while in the historical Teut. langs. it has remained capable of expressing this meaning, it has in all of them acquired a much wider application.

The form-history of the suffix in Eng. is similar to that of -ly¹:

in ME. the OE. -líce was normally represented by -līche (southern), -līke (northern), the compar. being -lī̆ker, -luker, -loker (superl. -est).

Citations from COCA:
           The Corpus of
     Contemporary American English
           (from 1990–2012)

Real language is much more complicated and nuanced than a third-grader’s grammar book will ever reveal. If you want a simplified version of reality, by all means, read the third-grader’s book. Just understand that it isn’t real good at telling you anything about how real people really talk. It’s all something something of an inconvenient lie, or at best, so simplified a version of reality as to no longer bear much semblance of the same.

As an adverb, it can only intensify other modifiers, and usually adjectives at that: it does not intensify verbs. You cannot *real hope for something, but you can be real hopeful that things will get better “real soon now” — at least in some dialects.

The original Teut. adjs. in -lîko- were compounds of the sb. *lîkom appearance, form, body (see lich). Thus *mannlîko- (‘manly’) means etymologically ‘having the appearance or form of a man’; gôðolîko- (‘goodly’) ‘having a good appearance or form’, or ‘having the appearance or form of what is good’. The primitive force of the suffix may therefore be rendered by ‘having the appearance or form indicated by the first element of the word’; but while in the historical Teut. langs. it has remained capable of expressing this meaning, it has in all of them acquired a much wider application.

The form-history of the suffix in Eng. is similar to that of -ly¹: in ME. the OE. -líce was normally represented by -līche (southern), -līke (northern), the compar. being -lī̆ker, -luker, -loker (superl. -est).

Citations from COCA:  The Corpus of Contemporary American English  (from 1990–2012)

Real language is much more complicated and nuanced than a third-grader’s grammar book will ever reveal. If you want a simplified version of reality, by all means, read the third-grader’s book. Just understand that it isn’t real good at telling you anything about how real people really talk. It’s all something of an inconvenient lie, or at best, so simplified a version of reality as to no longer bear much semblance of the same.