နေ
Something Going on Now
နေတယ် also covers what you are doing these days: ရန်ကုန်မှာ အလုပ်လုပ်နေတယ် means "I'm working in Yangon now."
How It Works
နေ means "stay" or "live" on its own. After another verb, it shows that the action is going on.
| Burmese | English |
|---|---|
| စားတယ်။ | I eat. / I ate. |
| စားနေတယ်။ | I'm eating. |
| စားနေမယ်။ | I'll be eating. |
| ဘာလုပ်နေလဲ။ | What are you doing? |
နေတယ် can also tell a story about the past: "When you called, I was eating." The time words around it show when.
Use it for weather too: မိုးရွာနေတယ် (It's raining). မိုးရွာမယ် means "It will rain."
To answer ဘာလုပ်နေလဲ, name the action and add နေတယ်: စာရေးနေတယ် (I'm writing), ထမင်းချက်နေတယ် (I'm cooking). Friends often ask this when they call.
For the negative, put မ before the main verb and end with ဘူး: ဘာမှ မလုပ်နေဘူး (I'm not doing anything).
With ပြီ, it says something has started and is going on: လာနေပြီ (I'm on my way).
Examples (5)
- နီလာ စာဖတ်နေတယ်။
Nila is reading.
နေ after ဖတ် shows the reading is going on.
- ကျွန်တော် ထမင်းစားနေတယ်။
I'm eating.
A man speaks; စားနေ means "is eating".
- မိုးရွာနေတယ်။
It's raining.
နေ shows the rain is falling right now.
- ဘာလုပ်နေလဲ။
What are you doing?
နေ with လဲ asks what is going on.
- ကျွန်မ အခု ရန်ကုန်မှာ အလုပ်လုပ်နေတယ်။
I'm working in Yangon now.
A woman speaks; နေ covers what is going on these days.
Common Mistakes
Using မယ် for something happening right now.
အခု မိုးရွာမယ်။အခု မိုးရွာနေတယ်။မယ် means it will happen. နေတယ် says it is happening now.
How It Connects
Learn This First
နေ is a helper between the verb and the ending, so the verb phrase order and တယ် come first.
Related Patterns
Learn Next
Patterns that build on this one.