တာပါ / တာလဲ

Explaining What Happened

Level 2

For a yes-or-no question, use တာလား: ရထားနဲ့ လာတာလား။ (Did you come by train?)

How It Works

When you ask about a detail of something that already happened, end the question with တာလဲ. The event is known; the question asks when, where, how, who or why.

QuestionMeaning
ဘယ်မှာ ဝယ်တာလဲ။Where did you buy it?
ဘယ်တုန်းက ရောက်တာလဲ။When did you get here?
ဘယ်သူ ချက်တာလဲ။Who cooked this?
ဘာလို့ မလာတာလဲ။Why didn't you come?

The answer ends with တာပါ. It explains, a bit like "It's that…" in English: ဈေးမှာ ဝယ်တာပါ။ (I bought it at the market.)

A yes-or-no question uses တာလား: ရထားနဲ့ လာတာလား။ (Did you come by train?)

တယ် cannot take လဲ, so ဘယ်မှာ ဝယ်တယ်လဲ is wrong. Use တာလဲ, or the other question ending သလဲ.

You do not need ခဲ့ with these endings, because the question is already about something done.

Examples (5)

  1. ဘယ်တုန်းက ရောက်တာလဲ။

    When did you get here?

    တာလဲ asks about a detail of a past event.

  2. ဒီအင်္ကျီ ဘယ်မှာ ဝယ်တာလဲ။

    Where did you buy this shirt?

    The buying is known; တာလဲ asks where.

  3. ဈေးမှာ ဝယ်တာပါရှင်။

    I bought it at the market.

    တာပါ explains; ရှင် shows a woman is speaking.

  4. ဘယ်သူ ချက်တာလဲ။

    Who cooked this?

    တာလဲ asks who did something already done.

  5. ကျွန်တော် ရထားနဲ့ လာတာပါ။

    I came by train.

    တာပါ explains how he came.

Common Mistakes

  • Using တယ် in a question about a past detail.

    ဘယ်မှာ ဝယ်တယ်လဲ။
    ဘယ်မှာ ဝယ်တာလဲ။

    တယ် cannot take လဲ. For a question about a past event, use တာလဲ.

How It Connects

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

တာပါ / တာလဲLevel 2Explaining What Happened

Learn This First

These endings are built on တာ and used with question words, so those come first.

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Patterns that build on this one.

Words in This Pattern

တာပါလဲ