Colloquial Burmese

The Complete Course for Beginners

San San Hnin Tun, Patrick McCormick

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317305583
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Languages & Linguistics
• Sous-sujet: Languages

Colloquial Burmese provides a step-by-step course in Burmese as it is written and spoken today. Combining a user-friendly approach with a thorough treatment of the language, it equips learners with the essential skills needed to communicate confidently and effectively in Burmese in a broad range of situations. No prior knowledge of the language is required.

Key features include:

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• progressive coverage of speaking, listening, reading and writing skills
• structured, jargon-free explanations of grammar
• an extensive range of focused and stimulating exercises
• realistic and entertaining dialogues covering a broad variety of scenarios
• useful vocabulary lists throughout the text
• review chapters at intervals throughout the text providing motivational checklists of language points covered
• an overview of the sounds of Burmese
• A full answer key and glossary at the back of the book

Balanced, comprehensive and rewarding, Colloquial Burmese will be an indispensable resource both for independent learners and for students taking courses in Burmese.

Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

Unit 1

A curious foreigner

In this unit, you will learn:

• to identify and name objects

• simple imperatives

• how to ask for the price of something

• numbers 10–10,000

• four basic vowel signs:

and four consonant clusters:

• representation of the tone system in Burmese

Dialogue 1

At a shop (Audio 1:12)

Imagine that you see a shop where they sell Burmese textiles. The shop owner invites you in, so you enter, find an item you like, ask for the price and buy it. It is customary to bargain in Myanmar, true, but at this point, let’s just accept the price and buy it, shall we?

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A: shop owner B: foreign visitor in Myanmar

Notes:

1. // represents the end of a sentence, when there are more than one present.

2. Reminder: underlined syllables are to be pronounced with a corresponding voiced consonant (see Introduction: Voicing).

A: Please come in! Have a look!

B: What is this?

A: It’s a “longyi”.

B: I see. How much is this longyi?

A: 5000 (Kyats).

B: Ah, 5000? Here, it is. Goodbye.

A: Goodbye.

Note:

For practical reasons, all English translation provided in dialogues are to be taken as an equivalent of the Burmese sentences in the same context. For example, the first line by the shop owner has three different “sentences” using three different verbs: /la/ to come, /win/...