မ…ဘူး

Negative Statements

Level 1

The same negative covers past, present and future, so မလာဘူး can mean "didn't come", "doesn't come" or "won't come".

How It Works

To make a sentence negative, put မ in front of the verb and end with ဘူး. Leave out တယ် and မယ်.

PositiveNegative
သောက်တယ်။ (drinks)မသောက်ဘူး။ (doesn't drink)
လာမယ်။ (will come)မလာဘူး။ (won't come)
စပ်တယ်။ (is spicy)မစပ်ဘူး။ (isn't spicy)
ဈေးကြီးတယ်။ (is expensive)ဈေးမကြီးဘူး။ (isn't expensive)

Because the negative has no time of its own, add a time word when it matters: မနေ့က မလာဘူး။ (didn't come yesterday), မနက်ဖြန် မလာဘူး။ (won't come tomorrow).

For politeness, ပါ goes between the verb and ဘူး: မသောက်ပါဘူး။

With a noun, the negative is မဟုတ်ဘူး, taught in its own entry.

Examples (5)

  1. ကျွန်တော် မသိဘူး။

    I don't know.

    A man speaks. မ comes before သိ, and ဘူး ends the sentence.

  2. မနေ့က သူ မလာဘူး။

    He didn't come yesterday.

    မနေ့က shows the past. သူ covers he or she.

  3. ဒီဟင်း မစပ်ဘူး။

    This curry isn't spicy.

    A describing word takes the same negative frame.

  4. ကျွန်မ ကော်ဖီ မသောက်ဘူး။

    I don't drink coffee.

    A woman speaks. The object stays before မ.

  5. ဒီနေ့ ရုံးမသွားဘူး။

    I'm not going to the office today.

    The same negative talks about a plan.

Common Mistakes

  • Keeping တယ် in a negative sentence.

    ကျွန်မ မသောက်တယ်။
    ကျွန်မ မသောက်ဘူး။

    A negative always ends with ဘူး. တယ် leaves the sentence.

  • Leaving out မ.

    ကျွန်တော် ကော်ဖီ သောက်ဘူး။
    ကျွန်တော် ကော်ဖီ မသောက်ဘူး။

    ဘူး needs မ before the verb. The two parts always go together.

How It Connects

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

မ…ဘူးLevel 1Negative Statements

Learn This First

A negative is a plain statement changed with မ and ဘူး, so တယ် comes first.

Learn Next

Patterns that build on this one.

And 4 more in the full list.

Words in This Pattern

မဘူးပါ