ရှိတယ် / မရှိဘူး

Having and There Is

Level 1

The same verb ရှိ also tells where a person is: ဆရာ ရုံးမှာ ရှိတယ်။ means "The teacher is at the office."

How It Works

ရှိ means "to be there" or "to exist". English splits this idea into "there is", "have" and "is at". Burmese uses ရှိ for all three.

MeaningBurmese
There is a bank.ဘဏ် ရှိတယ်။
There isn't a bank.ဘဏ် မရှိဘူး။
Is there a bank?ဘဏ် ရှိလား။
I have a car.ကျွန်တော့်မှာ ကား ရှိတယ်။

To say who has something, put the owner first and add မှာ: ကျွန်တော့်မှာ (I have, said by a man), ကျွန်မမှာ (I have, said by a woman), သူ့မှာ (he or she has).

ရှိ is only for being there or having. To say what someone is, such as "I am a teacher", put ပါ after the noun: ကျွန်မ ဆရာမပါ။

Examples (5)

  1. ကျွန်တော့်မှာ အစ်ကို နှစ်ယောက် ရှိတယ်။

    I have two older brothers.

    ကျွန်တော့်မှာ (said by a man) names the owner, and ရှိတယ် means "have".

  2. ဒီနားမှာ ဘဏ်ရှိလား။

    Is there a bank near here?

    ရှိလား asks whether something is there.

  3. ကျွန်မမှာ ပိုက်ဆံမရှိဘူး။

    I don't have any money.

    A woman speaks, so she says ကျွန်မမှာ; မရှိဘူး is the negative.

  4. ဆရာ ရုံးမှာ ရှိပါတယ်။

    The teacher is at the office.

    ရှိ with a place tells where a person is; ပါ makes it polite.

  5. မနက်ဖြန် ကျောင်းမရှိဘူး။

    There's no school tomorrow.

    မရှိဘူး says that something is not happening or not there.

Common Mistakes

  • Using ရှိတယ် to say what someone is.

    ကျွန်မ ဆရာမ ရှိတယ်။
    ကျွန်မ ဆရာမပါ။

    ရှိတယ် means "there is" or "have". To say what you are, put ပါ after the noun.

  • Ending a negative with တယ်.

    ပိုက်ဆံမရှိတယ်။
    ပိုက်ဆံမရှိဘူး။

    A verb with မ in front ends with ဘူး, never with တယ်.

How It Connects

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

ရှိတယ် / မရှိဘူးLevel 1Having and There Is

Learn This First

Having and there is use the verb ရှိ with its endings and the owner with မှာ.

Learn Next

Patterns that build on this one.

Words in This Pattern

ရှိမဘူးမှာ