ရ

Must and May

Level 2

For "don't have to", say မ…လည်းရတယ်: မလာလည်းရတယ် means "You don't have to come."

How It Works

ရ means "get" on its own. After a verb, it shows that something has to be done.

FormExampleEnglish
have to (plan)သွားရမယ်။I have to go.
had to, or a ruleသွားရတယ်။I had to go. / You have to go.
may I?သွားလို့ရလား။May I go?
you mayသွားလို့ရတယ်။You can go.

Use ရမယ် for something you must do soon. Use ရတယ် for something you had to do, or for a rule that is always true: ဘုရားပေါ်မှာ ဖိနပ်ချွတ်ရတယ်.

Keep လို့ for permission. Without it, ထိုင်ရလား asks "Do I have to sit?"

To answer a permission question, say ရပါတယ် (Yes, you may) or မရပါဘူး (No, you can't). Shop staff and guards often reply with just these two short phrases.

Examples (5)

  1. မနက်ဖြန် အလုပ်သွားရမယ်။

    I have to go to work tomorrow.

    ရမယ် shows something you must do soon.

  2. ဒီမှာ ထိုင်လို့ရလား။

    May I sit here?

    လို့ရလား asks for permission.

  3. ကျွန်မ မနေ့ည ဆယ်နာရီထိ အလုပ်လုပ်ရတယ်။

    I had to work until ten last night.

    A woman speaks; ရတယ် shows she had to.

  4. ဓာတ်ပုံ ရိုက်လို့ရမလား။

    Can I take a photo?

    လို့ရမလား is a polite way to ask permission.

  5. ဘုရားပေါ်မှာ ဖိနပ်ချွတ်ရတယ်။

    You have to take off your shoes at the pagoda.

    ရတယ် states a rule; ဘုရားပေါ် is the pagoda grounds.

Common Mistakes

  • Leaving out လို့ when you ask permission.

    ဒီမှာ ထိုင်ရလား။
    ဒီမှာ ထိုင်လို့ရလား။

    Without လို့, the question means "Do I have to sit here?"

How It Connects

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

ရLevel 2Must and May

Learn This First

Must and may use ရ with မယ် and in a question, so those come first.

Words in This Pattern

ရရလား