မလား

Offers and Plans

Level 1

Answer with the verb and မယ် for yes, or with မ…ဘူး for no: သောက်မယ်။ or မသောက်ဘူး။

How It Works

When you ask about something that has not happened yet, မယ် and လား join into one ending, မလား.

UseExampleMeaning
an offerကော်ဖီ သောက်မလား။Would you like a coffee?
an invitationရုပ်ရှင် သွားကြည့်မလား။Do you want to go see a movie?
a planမနက်ဖြန် လာမလား။Will you come tomorrow?
a guessမိုးရွာမလား။Will it rain?

Burmese hosts offer food and drink with မလား all the time. A friendly yes is the verb with မယ်. A polite no is မ…ပါဘူး, and မသောက်တော့ပါဘူး။ means No more for me, thanks.

The two parts are said together as one short ending, ma-la.

Examples (5)

  1. လက်ဖက်ရည် သောက်မလား။

    Would you like some tea?

    မလား turns the verb into an offer.

  2. မနက်ဖြန် လာမလား။

    Will you come tomorrow?

    မလား asks about a plan.

  3. ရုပ်ရှင် သွားကြည့်မလား။

    Do you want to go see a movie?

    An invitation with မလား.

  4. ဒီနေ့ မိုးရွာမလား။

    Will it rain today?

    မလား asks for a guess about the future.

  5. ညနေ အတူတူ ထမင်းစားမလား။

    Shall we have dinner together this evening?

    An invitation to eat together.

Common Mistakes

  • Keeping မယ် in front of လား.

    သောက်မယ်လား။
    သောက်မလား။

    မယ် and လား join into one ending, မလား.

How It Connects

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

မလားLevel 1Offers and Plans

Learn This First

Offers ask about the future, so မယ် and လား come first.

Words in This Pattern

မလားမယ်