ခဲ့

Talking About the Past

Level 1

When a time word such as မနေ့က (yesterday) already shows the past, you can leave ခဲ့ out.

How It Works

တယ် already covers the past, so မနေ့က သွားတယ်။ is correct. ခဲ့ adds a clear signal that the event is in the past and over. It is useful when no time word shows when it happened.

SentenceMeaning
ဆရာ လုပ်တယ်။I work as a teacher.
ဆရာ လုပ်ခဲ့တယ်။I worked as a teacher.
ရုံးမသွားခဲ့ဘူး။I didn't go to work.

Life events and finished stories use ခဲ့ often: where you were born, which school you went to, what someone built. In the negative, ခဲ့ stays inside the frame: မ, verb, ခဲ့, ဘူး.

After a vowel or a nasal, ခဲ့ is said geh.

Examples (5)

  1. ကျွန်မ မန္တလေးမှာ မွေးခဲ့တယ်။

    I was born in Mandalay.

    A woman speaks. ခဲ့ marks a finished past event.

  2. အရင်က ကျွန်တော် ဆရာ လုပ်ခဲ့တယ်။

    I used to work as a teacher.

    A man speaks. ခဲ့ shows the job is in the past.

  3. သူ စာမေးပွဲ အောင်ခဲ့တယ်။

    She passed the exam.

    ခဲ့ marks the result as past. သူ covers he or she.

  4. မနေ့က ကျွန်တော် ရုံးမသွားခဲ့ဘူး။

    I didn't go to work yesterday.

    In the negative, ခဲ့ sits between the verb and ဘူး.

  5. ဒီအိမ်ကို အဖေ ဆောက်ခဲ့တယ်။

    My father built this house.

    ခဲ့ follows the verb ဆောက် (build).

Common Mistakes

  • Putting ခဲ့ before the verb.

    ကျွန်မ ခဲ့သွားတယ်။
    ကျွန်မ သွားခဲ့တယ်။

    ခဲ့ is a helper word, so it follows the verb.

How It Connects

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

ခဲ့Level 1Talking About the Past

Learn This First

ခဲ့ goes in front of တယ်, so plain statements come first.

Learn Next

Patterns that build on this one.

Words in This Pattern

ခဲ့