COMMANDS, APPEALS, AND PROPOSALS
Make an affirmative statement with the ending suffix tae and use boo to make a negative statement. Here are a few more useful suffixes:
Forbid an action with naet, e.g., “Don’t drink coffee” Kaw phe ma-thauk naet.
Urge something to be done quickly with lite, i.e., “Go ahead and drink coffee”, Kaw phe thauk lite.
Rally others to join you in an action with kya so, (sometimes pronounced ja zo or ya aung). The two are interchangeable. For example, “Let’s drink coffee” or Kaw phe thauk kya zo/Kaw phe thauk ya aung.
Make a request with pah, (sometimes pronounced bah), i.e., “Please give me coffee” or Kaw phe payy bah.
The grammar rules for spoken Burmese outlined above covers only the most basic elements. But these should be quite sufficient to get you started.
In many examples above, I indicated that certain words have two possible pronunciations. That’s because many Burmese words are voiced differently depending on the word that comes before (even though it’s spelled exactly the same in the written form). There are rules that govern when the soft consonants (tae, tway) should be substituted with the heavier counterparts (dae, dway). But the rules are difficult to follow if you do not know how to decipher the written script. Therefore, for the purpose of instant communication, you’re much better off following the clues in the romanized voicing guide than to learn the rules.
PART ONE
Everyday Phrases
Useful Phrases
| Greetings!/Hello! | Min ga-lah bah! | မဂၤလာပါ၊ |
| Yes!/Right/Correct! | Hoke kaet! | ဟုတ္ကဲ႔။ |
| Is that so?/Is that the case? | Hoke laa. | ဟုတ္လား။ |
| It is so./That is the case. | Hoke tae. | ဟုတ္တယ္။ |
| It’s not so./It’s not true. | Ma hoke phoo. | မဟုတ္ဘူး။ |
NOTE Use hoke kaet like the English “yes” to express agreement or acceptance. However, the negative form ma hoke phoo is not a generic word for negation like the English “no”. Ma hoke phoo means “It’s not true.” Therefore, it’s not a suitable response to someone asking, “Are you feeling well?” (Nay kaungg laa), or someone insisting, “Please drink!” (Thauk pah).
Expressing Yourself
Is it good?
Kaungg laa.
ေကာင္းလား။
It’s good.
Kaungg dae.
ေကာင္းတယ္။
It’s not good.
Ma-kaungg boo.
မေကာင္းဘူး။
Do you like it?
Kyite laa.
ႀကိဳက္လား။
I like it.
Kyite tae.
ႀကိဳက္တယ္။
I don’t like it.
Ma-kyite phoo.
မႀကိဳက္ဘူး။
Do you know?
Thi laa.
သိလား။
I know.
Thi dae.
သိတယ္။
I don’t know.
Ma-thi boo.
မသိဘူး။
Got it? OK? Fine?
Ya laa.
ရလား။
Got it. OK. Fine.
Ya dae.
ရတယ္။
Not OK. Not fine.
Ma-ya boo.
မရဘူး။
Never mind.
Kait sa ma-shi boo.
ကိစၥမရွိဘူး။
Are you feeling well?
Nay kaungg laa.
ေနေကာင္းလား။
I’m feeling well.
Nay kaungg bah dae.
ေနေကာင္းပါတယ္။
I’m hungry.
Bike hsah dae.
ဗိုက္ဆာတယ္။
I’m tired.
Maww dae.
ေမာတယ္။
I’m bored.
Pyinn dae.
ပ်င္းတယ္။
I’m happy.
Pyaw dae.
ေပ်ာ္တယ္။
NOTE Pyaw dae uses the sentence structure