မလို့
About to Do Something
ဘယ်သွားမလို့လဲ is the everyday way to ask "Where are you off to?"
How It Works
မလို့ at the end of a sentence tells what you are about to do, or what you planned to do. It grew from မယ်လို့ (thinking "I will"), and it is said as one ending.
| Use | Example | English |
|---|---|---|
| telling your plan | ဈေးသွားမလို့။ | I'm about to go to the market. |
| asking someone's plan | ဘယ်သွားမလို့လဲ။ | Where are you off to? |
| a plan cut short | ဖုန်းဆက်မလို့ပဲ ရှိသေးတယ်။ | I was just about to call you. |
| a polite plan | မန္တလေးကို ပြောင်းမလို့ပါ။ | I'm planning to move to Mandalay. |
ဘယ်သွားမလို့လဲ is one of the most common greetings in Burmese. A short answer such as ဈေးကို (to the market) is enough.
V-မလို့ လုပ်နေတုန်း means "just as I was about to": something else happened first. ပါ before the end makes the plan polite.
At the end of a sentence, မလို့ tells a person's plan. For rain or anything else about to happen on its own, end with တော့မယ်: မိုးရွာတော့မယ်။ (It's about to rain.) You will also hear မိုးရွာမလို့ လုပ်နေတယ် (it looks like rain). For a plain future, use မယ်.
This is spoken Burmese, used in conversation and chats. Writing states an intention with မည်, or with ရန် (in order to).
Examples (5)
- ဈေးသွားမလို့၊ ဘာဝယ်ခဲ့ရမလဲ။
I'm about to go to the market. What should I get you?
မလို့ tells the listener your plan.
- ဦးလေး ဘယ်သွားမလို့လဲ။
Uncle, where are you off to?
With လဲ, မလို့ asks about someone's plan.
- ကျွန်မ အခု ဖုန်းဆက်မလို့ပဲ ရှိသေးတယ်။
I was just about to call you.
A woman is speaking; မလို့ပဲ ရှိသေးတယ် means "was just about to".
- ထမင်းစားမလို့ လုပ်နေတုန်း ဧည့်သည် ရောက်လာတယ်။
Just as I was about to eat, a guest arrived.
V-မလို့ လုပ်နေတုန်း means "just as I was about to".
- ကျွန်တော် နောက်လ မန္တလေးကို ပြောင်းမလို့ပါ။
I'm planning to move to Mandalay next month.
A man is speaking; ပါ makes the plan polite.
Common Mistakes
Ending a sentence about the weather with မလို့.
မိုးရွာမလို့။မိုးရွာတော့မယ်။At the end of a sentence, မလို့ tells a person's plan. Rain that is about to fall takes တော့မယ်.
How It Connects
Learn This First
About to do something is easiest to learn next to တော့မယ်.
Related Patterns
- မယ်Will and Going to
မယ် is the plain future.
Level 1 - လို့ပြောSaying What Someone Said
မလို့ grew from မယ်လို့, with the same လို့ that ends a quote.
Level 3 - မှာပါAnother Future Ending
မှာပါ is another way to say what you will do.
Level 2 - ရန်Purpose in Writing
ရန် is how writing says what something is for.
Level 4
Words in This Pattern
Practice မလို့ in Bubblegum
Poppy, your AI tutor, writes Burmese lessons at your level. Tap any grammar point in a lesson to see its full explanation.
