Learn how to describe a person

Back in lesson 9, we have learned how to describe a person in terms of height, body type, skin color, attitude, and personalities. From lesson 10, we also know how to say color words in Burmese.

What's next? We will now learn to describe a person in terms of clothing items that he or she is wearing, and also learn more words on general descriptions of people such as "pretty lady", "old man", "small girl", and so on.

On top of that, we will learn to combine those words into a sentence about a person right in front of you.

Learn descriptions of people in Burmese

For fun as well as for exercise, I have written a Burmese Phrase Maker / Translator in PHP, so you can construct the combinations on your own, and see the output sentence.

Remember from the previous lesson which says, "the man who is wearing a white shirt"?

အဖြူရောင် | a-pfyu2 youn2 — white color (noun)

အင်္ကျီ | ain3-ji2 — shirt (noun)

ဝတ် | woot — wear (verb)

ထားတဲ့ | hta3 deare1 — present participle [~ing] (particle)

လူ | lu2 — man (noun)

We will now add the physical description of that person.

လူဝကြီး | lu2 wa1 ji3

means "big fat man" and it will be taken here as a noun "lu2-wa1 ji3" without breaking it.

"White" is an adjective to describe the shirt. E.g.,

ဖြူသော အင်္ကျီ | pfyu2 dthau3 ain3-ji2 — shirt that is white.

အဖြူရောင် အင်္ကျီ ဝတ်ထားတဲ့ လူဝကြီး

a-pfyu2 youn2 ain3-ji2 woot hta3 deare1 lu2-wa1-ji3

the big fat man who is wearing a white shirt.

The important word you should remember in this lesson is the particle

ထားတဲ့ | hta3 deare1

equivalent to the English present participle [~ing], which converts the verb "wear" to "wearing" the item of clothing. In the literary form, the word is

ထားသော | hta3 dthau3 (or)

ထားသည့် | hta3 dthi1.

CULTURAL NOTE: Getting fat (opposite of skinny) is something one can be proud of. This means you are wealthy enough to eat what you want. Part of the greeting to a person that you have not seen for a long time may include

ဝလာတယ် | wa1 la2 deare2 — You have become fat,

which is a compliment. On the other hand, the opposite

ပိန်သွားတယ် | pain2 thwa3 deare2 — You have become skinny

is a show of concern for someone's health.

The General Format

Here's a general formula that will work with other physical descriptions, persons and items of clothing. You just have to substitute the required Burmese words as needed.

xxxx youn2 +

clothing +

wear +

hta3 deare1

ho2 +

person +

physical description of the person

ဟို | ho2 (pronoun)

means "that" in English. You can substitute

xxx ရောင် | xxxx youn2 (adjective)

with the list of colors provided in the previous lesson. Remember,

ထားတဲ့ | hta3 deare1 (particle)

is the present participle which adds [~ing] to the verb.

Here's a list of other words you can substitute in the above phrase:

clothing

to wear

ဝတ် | woot — wear all types of clothings

စီး | si3 — wear shoes, slippers, and all other footwear.

ဆောင်း | hsoun3 — wear hats and use umbrellas

Person

Physical description of people (ending words)

ဝဝကြီး | wa1 wa1 ji3 — fat, plump, chubby

ပိန်ပိန်လေး | pain2-pain2-lay3 — thin, slim, skinny

လံဗားကြီး | lun2-ba3 ji3 — tall and big (male)

အရပ်အမြင့်ကြီး | a-yut a-myin1-ji3 — tall (height + tall + to the high degree, level, or class)

ပုပုလေး | pu1-pu1-lay3 — short, shorty

လှလှလေး | hla1-hla1 lay3 — pretty, beautiful (reference to a girl or a woman.)

ချစ်စရာလေး | chit sa1-ya2 lay3 — cute and lovely

ရုပ်ဆိုးဆိုးကြီး | yoat hso3-zo3 ji3 — ugly (can be used for both sexes.)

Example

ပန်းရောင် ထီးဆောင်း ထားတဲ့ ဟိုဘဲ ပိန်ပိန်လေး

pan3 youn2 hti3 hsoun3 hta3 deare1 ho2 beare3 pain2-pain2 lay3

That skinny dude with pink umbrella.

Burmese Phrase Maker / Translator

Please make sure that you get the matching items. For example, if you select "slippers/shoes" for clothing, you must select "footwear" from the pull down menu.

And finally, if you would like to know who is that skinny dude with pink umbrella, just append beare2 dthu2 leare3 to the general formula.

Answer: It's the bird! It's the fly! No, its' Super A-CHOUT JI3!!!