ကို

Objects and Destinations

Level 1

With things, ကို is often left out: ထမင်းစားမယ် (I'll eat) needs no ကို. With people, keep it.

How It Works

ကို has two jobs, and both come after the noun.

  • The person an action is done to: ဆရာ့ကို မေးပါ။ (Please ask the teacher.)
  • The place you go to: ဈေးကို သွားမယ်။ (I'm going to the market.)

For a person, keep ကို. Without it, the listener may hear that person as the doer. သူ့ကို မသိဘူး means "I don't know him", but သူ မသိဘူး means "He doesn't know."

Before ကို, သူ and many words for people change to the creaky tone, shown by ့:

WordWith ကို
သူ (he, she)သူ့ကို
ဆရာ (teacher)ဆရာ့ကို
အမေ (mother)အမေ့ကို

ကို is also the title for a young man (ကိုဇော်ဇော်). Before a name it is the title; after a noun it marks the object.

Examples (5)

  1. ဈေးကို သွားမယ်။

    I'm going to the market.

    ဈေးကို marks where you are going.

  2. အမေ့ကို ဖုန်းဆက်မယ်။

    I'll call Mum.

    အမေ changes to အမေ့ before ကို.

  3. ဆရာ့ကို မေးပါ။

    Please ask the teacher.

    ဆရာ့ကို marks the person you ask.

  4. ကျွန်မ သူ့ကို မသိဘူး။

    I don't know him.

    A woman speaks; သူ့ကို marks the person she doesn't know. သူ means "he" or "she".

  5. ဘယ်ကို သွားမလဲ။

    Where are you going?

    ဘယ်ကို asks where someone is heading.

Common Mistakes

  • Leaving out ကို after a person.

    ကျွန်မ သူ မသိဘူး။
    ကျွန်မ သူ့ကို မသိဘူး။

    Without ကို, သူ sounds like the one who doesn't know.

  • Forgetting the tone change before ကို.

    သူကို ပေးမယ်။
    သူ့ကို ပေးမယ်။

    သူ, ဆရာ and အမေ take ့ before ကို.

How It Connects

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

ကိုLevel 1Objects and Destinations

Learn This First

ကို marks a part of the sentence that comes before the verb, so sentence order comes first.

Learn Next

Patterns that build on this one.

Words in This Pattern

ကိုကို