လေ

You Know

Level 3

After a request, လေ gently urges: စားလေ။ (Go on, eat.)

How It Works

လေ at the end of a sentence points to something the listener knows, or should know. In English it sounds like "you know" or "remember".

လေ comes after တယ်, မယ်, ဘူး, ပြီ, ပဲ or a bare verb. A host says လာလေ၊ ထိုင်လေ to make a guest feel welcome.

When you repeat something the listener forgot, လေ said with a falling voice sounds a little impatient. Between friends, it sounds friendly and warm.

This လေ is a different word from the pair …လေ …လေ, which means "the more …, the more …". It is also different from လေ meaning "wind" or "air".

မနေ့က ပြောပြီးပြီလေ။
I told you yesterday, remember?
လေ reminds the listener of something they forgot.
ဒီနေ့ တနင်္ဂနွေနေ့ပဲလေ။
It's Sunday today, you know.
လေ after ပဲ points to a fact the listener should know.
သူ အသားမစားဘူးလေ။
He doesn't eat meat, you see.
လေ follows ဘူး to explain; သူ means "he" or "she".
လာလေ၊ ထိုင်လေ။
Come on in, sit down.
A host uses လေ to urge a guest warmly.
ကျွန်တော် ရန်ကုန်မှာ နေတာ ဆယ်နှစ်ရှိပြီလေ။
I've lived in Yangon for ten years now, you know.
A man is speaking; လေ follows ပြီ.

Using ပြီး alone for "already".
ပြောပြီးလေ။
ပြောပြီးပြီလေ။
ပြီး alone means "and then". "Already" is ပြီးပြီ, and လေ comes after it.

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

လေLevel 3You Know

You know is another word added after the ending, often after ပြီ.

လေ

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