ခဲ့ရင်

If It Had Happened

Level 4

The result often adds ပေါ့ for a sigh of regret: ပြောပြမှာပေါ့ (I would have told you, of course).

How It Works

ခဲ့ရင် builds an "if only" sentence about the past. ခဲ့ puts the condition in the past, and ရင် makes it "if". The result ends in မှာ: စောစော ထွက်ခဲ့ရင် ရထား မီမှာ။ (If we had left early, we would have caught the train.)

SentenceMeaning
စောစော ထွက်ရင် မီမယ်။If we leave early, we'll make it.
စောစော ထွက်ခဲ့ရင် မီမှာ။If we had left early, we would have made it.

The situation tells the listener that the condition did not happen: the train has already gone. A past time word such as မနေ့က (yesterday) makes this clearer still.

A negative condition puts မ before the verb: မိုးမရွာခဲ့ရင် (if it hadn't rained).

The result can add ပေါ့ or ပဲ for feeling: ကျွန်မ သိခဲ့ရင် ပြောပြမှာပေါ့ (if I had known, I would have told you, of course).

ခဲ့ရင် with မယ် or with a request talks about something that may still happen: ကိုဇော်ဇော်ကို တွေ့ခဲ့ရင် ပြောလိုက်ပါ (if you happen to see Ko Zaw Zaw, tell him). When the moment has passed and the result ends in မှာ, the sentence means "would have".

This pattern is common for regrets and near misses: ခင်ဗျား ဖုန်းဆက်ခဲ့ရင် ကျွန်တော် လာကြိုမှာ (if you had called, I would have come to pick you up).

Examples (5)

  1. စောစော ထွက်ခဲ့ရင် ရထား မီမှာ။

    If we had left early, we would have caught the train.

    ခဲ့ရင် sets an unreal past, and မှာ gives the missed result.

  2. ကျွန်မ သိခဲ့ရင် ပြောပြမှာပေါ့ရှင်။

    If I had known, I would have told you, of course.

    A woman explains, and ပေါ့ adds "of course".

  3. မိုးမရွာခဲ့ရင် ပွဲ ပိုစည်ကားမှာ။

    If it hadn't rained, the festival would have been livelier.

    မ before ရွာ makes the unreal condition negative.

  4. ခင်ဗျား ဖုန်းဆက်ခဲ့ရင် ကျွန်တော် လာကြိုမှာ။

    If you had called, I would have come to pick you up.

    A man tells the listener what he would have done.

  5. ဒီအိမ်ကို အရင်နှစ်က ဝယ်ခဲ့ရင် ဈေးသက်သာမှာ။

    If we had bought this house last year, it would have been cheaper.

    အရင်နှစ်က places the unreal condition last year.

Common Mistakes

  • Dropping ခဲ့ when the moment has already passed.

    မနေ့က စောစော ထွက်ရင် ရထား မီမယ်။
    မနေ့က စောစော ထွက်ခဲ့ရင် ရထား မီမှာ။

    ထွက်ရင် … မီမယ် is a plan for the future, so it cannot go with မနေ့က. For a past that did not happen, use ခဲ့ရင် and end with မှာ.

How It Connects

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

ခဲ့ရင်Level 4If It Had Happened

Learn This First

If it had happened joins ခဲ့ with ရင် and ends the result with မှာ.

Words in This Pattern

ခဲ့ရင်မှာ