In San Francisco, the city I now call home, the large Christmas tree in downtown Union Square has officially been turned on to usher in the holiday season. In Chiang Mai, Thailand, home to my guests for this episode, regular night markets have turned into Christmas markets. For this special year-end episode, I invited Su and Zue, two Chiang Mai-based Burmese teachers, to talk about Christmas, from our earliest memories of the carol singers, our favorite Christmas movies and books, and our preferred hot drinks, to the presents we might give one another if we were to have a gift exchange. So grab your eggnog or nutmeg-flavored coffee, and join us. (Photo of Wat Arun with fireworks by Prasit Rodphan, licensed from Shutterstock. Music excerpts courtesy of Pixabay.)

Vocabulary

သုံးပွင့်ဆိုင်စကားဝိုင်း a three-way conversation
ခရစ်ယာန် Christian
အဆောင် boarding house
မုန့်ဖိုးတောင်းတယ် to ask for tip / money
ယေရှု Jesus
ဘုရားသခင် God
တားမြစ်တယ် to forbid
ကားစင် / လက်ဝါးကပ်တိုင် the crucifix
ဆင်နွှဲတယ် to celebrate / to participate in festive activities
ဖျော်ရည် flavored drink / juice
ကျင်းပတယ် to hold (an event, a festival)
သောင်းသောင်းဖြဖြ energetically, earnestly
နားစွင့်တယ် to listen for a certain sound
ဂီတာကြိုး guitar string
ကောင်းချီးမင်္ဂလာ blessings
မြို့လယ်ခေါင် downtown, center of the town
မြို့တော်ဝန် mayor
ကိုယ်စားလှယ် representative
အလှဆင်တယ် to decorate
လုပ်ဖေါ်ကိုင်ဖက် coworkers
လက်ဆောင်လဲတယ် to exchange gifts
လက်မှုလုပ်ငန်း handcraft business
ရိုးရာဓလေ့ tradition / customs
အဖြူအမည်းကား black and white movie
အမွေးအကြိုင် spices
သည်းထိတ်ရင်ဖို thriller
ဝက်ဝက်ကွဲ overwhelmingly
ဘဲ boyfriend (slang)
မဖြစ်မနေ unavoidably, definitely
မှတ်မှတ်ရရ memorably
လွှမ်းမိုးတယ် to influence, to dominate
ဝိညာဏ်တော်သုံးပါး three spirits
တရားပြတယ် to give spiritual guidance, to enlighten
စာအုပ်ချုပ်တယ် to bind books
စာအုပ်ရွဲနေတယ် the book is in a bad shape (slang)
အခါသမယ auspicious period

Have a question about a Burmese word or phrase you heard here? Send us a message.

Imagine this. You’re a diplomat, and in the middle of an embassy cocktail party, you suddenly switch language and speak to your counterpart from the host country in his or her mother tongue, with the kind of fluency that only comes from years of dedicated learning. With that display of earnest interest in the host country's culture, you’re bound to impress those in attendance. Who knows? The favorable impression you’ve made might even help you broker a peace deal or a trade agreement in the future.

My special guest for this episode is linguist, teacher, and translator Ye Min Tun, who has spent more than a decade teaching Burmese to the diplomats heading to Burma. For this episode, we discuss how language and culture knowledge facilitate diplomatic relationships. See if you can pick up a few Burmese words and phrases to help you sound more diplomatic. (Musical excerpts courtesy of Pixabay)

Vocabulary

အထူးဧည့်သည်တော် special guest

နိုင်ငံခြားရေးဝန်ထမ်း foreign service officer, foreign office staff

... [အဖြစ်] တာဝန်ထမ်းဆောင်တယ် to perform duties [as], to serve [in the capacity of], to work [as]

သံတမန် diplomat

အမျိုးသားအကျိုးစီးပွား national & economic interest

ကာကွယ်တယ် to protect

မြှင့်တင်တယ် to promote

မိတ်ဆွေနိုင်ငံ ally nation

ရန်သူနိုင်ငံ enemy nation / hostile nation

ထမင်းစားရေသောက်အဆင့် functional fluency (literally, fluency sufficient for eating and drinking)

ကျွဲကူးရေပါ (figure of speech) when accomplishing the main objective, minor objectives are also accomplished (literally, the water follows when a buffalo swims)

ဖိဖိစီးစီး (adverb) strenuously, intensely

နိုင်ငံရေး politics

စီးပွားရေး economics

သိပ္ပံ science

စိုက်ပျိုးရေး agriculture

ကောင်စစ်ဝန် counsellor / senior diplomat

သင်္ကြန် Thingyan festival, Burmese new year festival

စတုဒိသာ a general feast where anyone is welcome

သံအမတ် ambassador

ဝင်စားတယ် to reincarnate

ကွမ်းသီးကြိုက်သူကိုတောင်ငူပို့ to send a betelnut lover to Taungoo (known for the best betelnut)

ဖုတ်ပူမီးတိုက် (adverb) hurriedly, speedily

ပုံရိပ် impression, image

နေ့ကောင်းရက်သာ special days

တရားဝင် (adverb) officially

ဗမာဆန်တယ် to be Burmese centric

ကိုးလိုးကန့်လန့် (adverb) awkwardly

ယုန်ထင်ကြောင်ထင် (figure of speech) to cause confusion (literally, to mistake something for a rabbit or a cat)

Have a question about a Burmese word or phrase you heard here? Send us a message.

Many Burmese words describing how you feel—happy, sad, depressed, and so on—are constructed with the root words ဝမ်း for "belly" or "womb," and စိတ် for "the mind." The phrase ဝမ်းသာတယ် "to be glad, to be happy" literally translates to "the belly is pleasant, favorable." The opposite phrase ဝမ်းနည်းတယ် "to be sad or unhappy" is "the belly is deficient."

To feel an overwhelming happiness is ဝမ်းသာလုံးဆို့နေတယ်, a picturesque phrase that means "to be choking on a ball of happiness." And to be overtaken by sadness or grief is ဝမ်းနည်းပက်လက် , an adverb describing someone grieving in a horizontal, face-up position.

In this episode, I introduce you to words and phrases to describe feelings and emotions—with melodramatic, hyperbolic options if you so desire. (Music: "Sunshine Dreams" by Kaazoom, Pixabay)

Vocabulary

• ဝမ်းသာတယ် to be happy, glad
• ဝမ်းနည်းတယ် to be unhappy, sad
• ဝမ်းသာအားရ happily, with great happiness (adverb)
• ဝမ်းမြောက်ဝမ်းသာ happily, with great happiness (adverb)
• ဝမ်းပန်းတသာ happily, with great happiness (adverb)
• ဝမ်းသာအယ်လဲ happily, with great happiness (adverb)
• ဝမ်းသာလုံးဆို့နေတယ် to be overwhelmed with happiness (lit. to be choking on a ball of happiness)
• ဝမ်းနည်းပက်လက် to be unhappy (lit. sad and flat)
• စိတ်ကောင်းတယ် to be kind, good-natured
• စိတ်မကောင်းဘူး to be sad
• စိတ်ထားမကောင်းဘူး to be of spiteful, malicious temperament
• စိတ်ပုတ်တယ် to be spiteful, malicious (lit. to have a rotten mind)
• စိတ်ဆင်းရဲတယ် to be depressed, frustrated (lit. the mind is impoverished)
• စိတ်ညစ်တယ် to be depressed, frustrated (lit. the mind is tainted, dirty)
• စိတ်ချမ်းသာတယ် to be content, satisfied, delighted (lit. the mind is luxurious)

Have a question about a Burmese word or phrase you heard here? Send us a message.