နာရီ / မိနစ်

Telling the Time

Level 2

Put a time of day first, such as မနက် (morning) or ညနေ (evening), and add မှာ for "at": မနက် ရှစ်နာရီမှာ (at eight in the morning).

How It Works

Telling the time follows the same number pattern as counting. The number comes first, then နာရီ or မိနစ်.

BurmeseEnglish
ခုနစ်နာရီseven o'clock
ခုနစ်နာရီခွဲhalf past seven
ခုနစ်နာရီ ဆယ့်ငါးမိနစ်quarter past seven
မနက် ခုနစ်နာရီseven in the morning
ည ခုနစ်နာရီseven at night

The times of day are မနက် (morning), နေ့လယ် (midday), ညနေ (late afternoon and evening) and ည (night). Burmese uses them in place of "a.m." and "p.m."

To say "it is" a time, end with ရှိပြီ: ခုနစ်နာရီခွဲ ရှိပြီ။ To say "at" a time, add မှာ.

နာရီ also means a clock or a watch.

To ask the time, say ဘယ်နှနာရီ ရှိပြီလဲ။ To ask when something starts, say ဘယ်နှနာရီမှာ စမလဲ။ (What time does it start?) The answer uses the hour and မှာ: ကိုးနာရီမှာ (at nine).

Examples (5)

  1. ခုနစ်နာရီခွဲ ရှိပြီ။

    It's half past seven.

    ခွဲ after the hour means "half past".

  2. မနက် ရှစ်နာရီမှာ အလုပ်သွားတယ်။

    I go to work at eight in the morning.

    မနက် shows morning, and မှာ means "at".

  3. ညနေ ငါးနာရီ ဆယ်မိနစ်မှာ တွေ့မယ်။

    I'll see you at ten past five this evening.

    The minutes come after the hour.

  4. ဘတ်စ်ကား ဆယ့်ငါးမိနစ် နောက်ကျတယ်။

    The bus is fifteen minutes late.

    မိနစ် also measures how long.

  5. ရုံးကို တစ်နာရီကြာတယ်။

    It takes an hour to get to the office.

    နာရီ with ကြာ says how long something takes.

Common Mistakes

  • Putting နာရီ before the number.

    နာရီ ခုနစ်
    ခုနစ်နာရီ

    The number comes first, then နာရီ.

How It Connects

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

နာရီ / မိနစ်Level 2Telling the Time

Learn This First

Telling the time uses numbers with နာရီ, the how-many question and မှာ for at.

Words in This Pattern

နာရီမိနစ်ခွဲ