Describing Words Are Verbs

Level 1

The negative wraps the describing word in မ…ဘူး: မပူဘူး။ (It isn't hot.)

How It Works

English says The coffee is hot, with the word is. Burmese has no word for is here, because the describing word is itself the verb: ကော်ဖီ ပူတယ်။

EndingExampleMeaning
တယ်ကောင်းတယ်။It's good.
မ…ဘူးမကောင်းဘူး။It isn't good.
လားကောင်းလား။Is it good?
မယ်ကောင်းမယ်။It will be good.

Many describing words are made of a noun and a verb: ဈေးကြီး (price big, expensive), ဗိုက်ဆာ (stomach hungry). မ goes before the verb part: ဈေးမကြီးဘူး။ (It isn't expensive).

To use a describing word inside a longer noun phrase, such as a spicy curry, you need one more pattern, taught at Level 2.

Examples (5)

  1. ဒီနေ့ အေးတယ်။

    It's cold today.

    အေး (cold) takes the ending တယ် like any verb.

  2. ဒီဟင်း စပ်တယ်။

    This curry is spicy.

    စပ် (spicy) is the verb, so no word for "is" is needed.

  3. မုန့်ဟင်းခါး ကောင်းလား။

    Is the mohinga good?

    ကောင်း takes the question ending လား.

  4. ဟော်တယ် ဈေးမကြီးဘူး။

    The hotel isn't expensive.

    မ goes inside ဈေးကြီး, before the verb part ကြီး.

  5. ကျွန်တော် ဗိုက်ဆာတယ်။

    I'm hungry.

    A man speaks. ဗိုက်ဆာ (hungry) is a verb with တယ်.

Common Mistakes

  • Adding a word for "is".

    ဒီနေ့ ပူဖြစ်တယ်။
    ဒီနေ့ ပူတယ်။

    ပူ already means "to be hot". Add only the ending.

  • Putting မ before the whole two-part word.

    ဟော်တယ် မဈေးကြီးဘူး။
    ဟော်တယ် ဈေးမကြီးဘူး။

    In ဈေးကြီး, the verb is ကြီး, so မ goes right before it.

How It Connects

Tap a pattern to see what it builds on and what it leads to.

Describing Words Are VerbsLevel 1

Learn This First

Describing words take endings just like verbs, so the plain statement ending comes first.

Learn Next

Patterns that build on this one.