တယ်တဲ့ / မယ်တဲ့

Passing on What You Heard

Level 3

Keep the original ending: တယ်တဲ့, မယ်တဲ့, ဘူးတဲ့, ပါတဲ့.

How It Works

တဲ့ is a short way to say "someone said" or "I heard". You keep the sentence you heard and add တဲ့ at the end.

What you heardPassing it on
ကောင်းတယ်။ကောင်းတယ်တဲ့။ (People say it's good.)
မိုးရွာမယ်။မိုးရွာမယ်တဲ့။ (I heard it'll rain.)
မလာနိုင်ဘူး။မလာနိုင်ဘူးတဲ့။ (He says he can't come.)
စောင့်ပါ။စောင့်ပါတဲ့။ (She says to wait.)

You can name the speaker with က: ဆရာက ခဏစောင့်ပါတဲ့။ (The teacher says to wait a moment.) If you leave out the speaker, the meaning is "I heard" or "people say".

This တဲ့ comes after a full sentence. The other တဲ့ comes after a bare verb and describes a noun (နေတဲ့ သူငယ်ချင်း). For a fuller report with a verb like ပြော or မေး, use လို့ပြော.

To ask what someone said, use ဘာတဲ့လဲ။ (What did she say?)

Examples (5)

  1. မနက်ဖြန် မိုးရွာမယ်တဲ့။

    I heard it's going to rain tomorrow.

    မယ်တဲ့ passes on a forecast.

  2. ကိုကို ခဏနေ ရောက်မယ်တဲ့။

    Ko Ko says he'll be here soon.

    The sentence keeps မယ် before တဲ့.

  3. ဒီဆိုင်က မုန့်ဟင်းခါး အရမ်းကောင်းတယ်တဲ့။

    People say the mohinga at this shop is really good.

    တယ်တဲ့ passes on what people say.

  4. ဇော်ဇော် ဒီနေ့ မလာနိုင်ဘူးတဲ့။

    Zaw Zaw says he can't come today.

    A negative keeps ဘူး before တဲ့.

  5. ဆရာက ခဏစောင့်ပါတဲ့။

    The teacher says to wait a moment.

    A request keeps ပါ before တဲ့.

Common Mistakes

  • Adding တဲ့ to your own statement.

    ကျွန်မ ဗိုက်ဆာတယ်တဲ့။
    ကျွန်မ ဗိုက်ဆာတယ်။

    A woman wants to say "I'm hungry". တဲ့ means someone else said it, so she leaves it out.

How It Connects

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

တယ်တဲ့ / မယ်တဲ့Level 3Passing on What You Heard

Learn This First

Passing on what you heard is the short form of reported speech, so reported speech and endings come first.

Words in This Pattern

တဲ့မယ်