ဘာကြောင့် / ဘာလို့

Why

Level 2

ဘာလို့ is the everyday choice. ဘာကြောင့် sounds a little more careful and also appears in writing.

How It Works

ဘာ means "what". ဘာလို့ is "because of what", so "why". ဘာကြောင့် is built the same way with ကြောင့် (because of). Like every question with a question word, a why-question ends in လဲ.

QuestionMeaning
ဘာလို့ ငိုနေတာလဲ။Why are you crying?
ဘာကြောင့် နောက်ကျတာလဲ။Why were you late?
ဘာလို့ မစားတာလဲ။Why aren't you eating?
ဘာကြောင့် မန္တလေးကို သွားမှာလဲ။Why are you going to Mandalay?

For something that has happened or is happening, end with တာလဲ. For a plan, end with မှာလဲ.

The answer gives the reason with လို့ or ကြောင့်, and ပါ at the end makes it polite: ကား ပျက်လို့ပါ။ (Because my car broke down.) မိုးကြောင့်ပါ။ (Because of the rain.)

Use ဘာလို့ with friends and family. ဘာကြောင့် fits a more careful question, such as one to a teacher, and it also appears in writing.

Examples (5)

  1. ဘာလို့ ငိုနေတာလဲ။

    Why are you crying?

    ဘာလို့ asks why, and the question ends in တာလဲ.

  2. ဘာကြောင့် နောက်ကျတာလဲ။

    Why were you late?

    ဘာကြောင့် is a more careful "why".

  3. ခင်ဗျား ဘာလို့ မြန်မာစာ သင်တာလဲ။

    Why are you learning Burmese?

    ခင်ဗျား shows a man is asking.

  4. ဘာလို့ မစားတာလဲ၊ မကြိုက်ဘူးလား။

    Why aren't you eating? Don't you like it?

    ဘာလို့ comes before the negative verb မစား.

  5. ဘာကြောင့် မန္တလေးကို သွားမှာလဲ။

    Why are you going to Mandalay?

    မှာလဲ asks about a plan.

Common Mistakes

  • Ending a why-question with လား.

    ဘာလို့ မလာတာလား။
    ဘာလို့ မလာတာလဲ။

    A question with a question word such as ဘာလို့ ends in လဲ.

  • Ending a why-question with တယ်.

    ဘာလို့ နောက်ကျတယ်။
    ဘာလို့ နောက်ကျတာလဲ။

    A question needs a question ending. Use တာလဲ for something that happened.

How It Connects

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

ဘာကြောင့် / ဘာလို့Level 2Why

Learn This First

A why question asks for a reason and usually ends with တာလဲ, so because and the explaining endings come first.

Words in This Pattern

ဘာလို့ဘာကြောင့်လဲ