…လေ …လေ

The More, The Better

Level 3

Many speakers add ပဲ at the end: စောလေ ကောင်းလေပဲ။ (The sooner, the better.)

How It Works

The first half names what grows, and the second half names what grows with it.

FirstSecondEnglish
ကြာလေကောင်းလေ။The longer, the better.
စောလေကောင်းလေပဲ။The sooner, the better.
လေ့ကျင့်လေတော်လာလေပဲ။The more you practise, the better you get.
စဉ်းစားလေစိတ်ပူလေပဲ။The more I think, the more I worry.

Short pairs work as sayings: ကြာလေ ဆိုးလေ (The longer it goes on, the worse it gets).

Keep တယ် out. With တယ်, the sentence ending လေ means "you know": ဖတ်တယ်လေ (I read it, you know). That is a different pattern.

To compare two things, use ထက်: ဒါက အဲဒါထက် ကောင်းတယ် (This is better than that).

Both halves can be describing words, as in ကြာလေ ကောင်းလေ, or actions, as in ဖတ်လေ နားလည်လေ (The more you read, the more you understand).

Examples (5)

  1. ကြာလေ ကောင်းလေ။

    The longer, the better.

    Each verb takes လေ.

  2. စောလေ ကောင်းလေပဲ။

    The sooner, the better.

    ပဲ at the end adds weight.

  3. လေ့ကျင့်လေ တော်လာလေပဲ။

    The more you practise, the better you get.

    The second half grows with the first.

  4. ကျွန်တော် ဒီသီချင်း နားထောင်လေ ကြိုက်လေပဲ။

    The more I listen to this song, the more I like it.

    A man speaks. Neither verb has တယ်.

  5. ကျွန်မ စဉ်းစားလေ စိတ်ပူလေပဲ။

    The more I think about it, the more I worry.

    A woman speaks. Worry grows with thinking.

Common Mistakes

  • Putting တယ် before each လေ.

    ဖတ်တယ်လေ နားလည်တယ်လေ။
    ဖတ်လေ နားလည်လေပဲ။

    With တယ်, လေ means "you know". For "the more … the more", join လေ straight to each verb.

How It Connects

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

…လေ …လေLevel 3The More, The Better

Learn This First

The more, the better builds on comparing with more.