လား

Yes-or-No Questions

Level 1

လား also follows a noun to ask "Is it…?": ကျောင်းသားလား။ (Are you a student?)

How It Works

A yes-or-no question looks like a statement with a new ending. Take away တယ် and put လား in its place.

StatementQuestion
ဈေးကြီးတယ်။ (It's expensive.)ဈေးကြီးလား။ (Is it expensive?)
ကျောင်းသားပါ။ (I'm a student.)ကျောင်းသားလား။ (Are you a student?)
သွားမယ်။ (I'll go.)သွားမလား။ (Will you go?)

A good answer repeats the verb: ကြိုက်လား။ (Do you like it?) gets ကြိုက်တယ်။ (I do) or မကြိုက်ဘူး။ (I don't).

A question with a word such as ဘာ (what) or ဘယ် (where) takes လဲ instead.

A negative question keeps both parts of the frame: မကြိုက်ဘူးလား။ means Don't you like it?

Examples (5)

  1. နေကောင်းလား။

    How are you?

    Literally "Are you well?", a yes-or-no question with လား.

  2. ဒါ ဈေးကြီးလား။

    Is this expensive?

    လား takes the place of တယ်.

  3. ဗိုက်ဆာလား။

    Are you hungry?

    A short question with no word for "you".

  4. ဒီဘတ်စ်ကား ဆူးလေကို သွားလား။

    Does this bus go to Sule?

    The order stays the same as in a statement.

  5. သူ ကျောင်းသားလား။

    Is he a student?

    လား follows a noun. သူ covers he or she.

Common Mistakes

  • Using လား with a question word.

    ဒါ ဘာလား။
    ဒါ ဘာလဲ။

    A question with ဘာ (what) or ဘယ် ends with လဲ.

How It Connects

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

လားLevel 1Yes-or-No Questions

Learn This First

A yes-or-no question swaps တယ် for လား, so plain statements come first.

Learn Next

Patterns that build on this one.

Words in This Pattern

လား