Passive Voice with (အခံရသည်)
Grammar Rule in 30 Seconds
Use ခံရ (khan-ya) after a verb to show the subject is receiving an action, usually something unpleasant.
- Place ခံရ (khan-ya) directly after the main verb: ရိုက် (hit) becomes ရိုက်ခံရ (be hit).
- The person doing the action is marked with က (ga): သူက ကျွန်တော့်ကို ရိုက်တယ် (He hit me).
- It is mostly used for negative experiences like being scolded, hit, or cheated.
Passive Verb Formation
| Verb Root | Passive Marker | Tense/Politeness | Full Passive Form |
|---|---|---|---|
|
ရိုက် (hit)
|
ခံရ
|
တယ် (Present/Past)
|
ရိုက်ခံရတယ် (was/is hit)
|
|
ဆူ (scold)
|
ခံရ
|
မယ် (Future)
|
ဆူခံရမယ် (will be scolded)
|
|
ဖမ်း (catch)
|
ခံရ
|
ပြီ (Perfect)
|
ဖမ်းခံရပြီ (has been caught)
|
|
လိမ် (lie/cheat)
|
ခံရ
|
သည် (Formal)
|
လိမ်ခံရသည် (is cheated)
|
Meanings
The passive voice in Burmese is primarily formed using the auxiliary verb ခံရ (khan-ya), which literally means 'to undergo' or 'to suffer'. It shifts the focus from the doer to the receiver of the action.
Adversative Passive
Used when the subject is negatively affected by an action.
“သူ ခိုးယူခံရတယ်။ (He was robbed.)”
“ကလေးက အမေ ဆူတာ ခံရတယ်။ (The child was scolded by his mother.)”
Formal/Academic Passive
Used in news or formal writing to describe events where the agent is unknown or unimportant.
“မြို့သစ်ကို တည်ဆောက်ခံရသည် (The new city was built - Note: rare, usually uses 'ပြုလုပ်သည်')”
“တရားခံကို ဖမ်းဆီးခံရသည်။ (The suspect was arrested.)”
Reference Table
| Form | Structure | Example |
|---|---|---|
|
Affirmative
|
Verb + ခံရ + တယ်
|
ရိုက်ခံရတယ် (Was hit)
|
|
Negative
|
မ + Verb + ခံရ + ဘူး
|
မရိုက်ခံရဘူး (Wasn't hit)
|
|
Question
|
Verb + ခံရ + သလား
|
ရိုက်ခံရသလား (Were you hit?)
|
|
Formal
|
Verb + ခြင်း + ခံရသည်
|
ဖမ်းဆီးခြင်းခံရသည် (Was arrested)
|
|
With Agent
|
Agent + က + Verb + ခံရ
|
သူက ရိုက်တာ ခံရတယ် (Was hit by him)
|
Spectre de formalité
ကျွန်ုပ်သည် ဆရာ၏ အပြစ်တင်ခြင်းကို ခံရပါသည်။ (School environment)
ကျွန်တော် ဆရာဆူတာ ခံရတယ်။ (School environment)
ငါ ဆရာ့ဆူတာ ခံလိုက်ရတယ်ဟာ။ (School environment)
ဆရာ့ဆော်တာ ခံလိုက်ရတယ်ဗျာ။ (School environment)
Passive Voice Usage
Negative Actions
- ရိုက်ခံရ be hit
- ဆူခံရ be scolded
Formal Events
- ဖမ်းခံရ be arrested
- ရွေးချယ်ခံရ be selected
Active vs Passive Focus
Exemples par niveau
ကျွန်တော် အဆူခံရတယ်။
I was scolded.
သူ အရိုက်ခံရတယ်။
He was hit.
ခွေးက ရိုက်တာ ခံရတယ်။
The dog was hit (by someone).
ကျွန်တော် ဖိတ်ခေါ်ခံရတယ်။
I was invited.
သူခိုးသည် ရဲဖမ်းတာကို ခံရသည်။
The thief was caught by the police.
ကျွန်တော် အလုပ်က ထုတ်ခံရတယ်။
I was fired from work.
ထိုအဆောက်အဦးသည် မီးလောင်ကျွမ်းခြင်း ခံရသည်။
That building was destroyed by fire.
သူသည် လူအများ၏ လှောင်ပြောင်ခြင်းကို ခံရသည်။
He was mocked by the crowd.
ဥပဒေအရ အရေးယူခြင်း ခံရမည်ဖြစ်သည်။
Action will be taken according to the law.
နိုင်ငံရေးအရ ဖိနှိပ်ခံရမှုများ ရှိခဲ့သည်။
There were instances of political oppression.
ခေတ်အဆက်ဆက် ဖိနှိပ်ချုပ်ချယ်ခြင်း ခံခဲ့ရသော ပြည်သူတို့၏ ဘဝ။
The lives of the people who have been oppressed throughout successive eras.
ဝေဖန်တိုက်ခိုက်ခံရမှုများကို ကြံ့ကြံ့ခံနိုင်ရမည်။
One must be able to withstand being criticized and attacked.
Facile à confondre
Learners often use 'ya' (to get) for both positive and negative passive actions.
Both can imply something happened accidentally or negatively.
Erreurs courantes
ကျွန်တော် လက်ဆောင် ခံရတယ်။
ကျွန်တော် လက်ဆောင် ရတယ်။
သူကို ရိုက်ခံရတယ်။
သူ ရိုက်ခံရတယ်။
သူက ကျွန်တော်ကို ရိုက်ခံရတယ်။
ကျွန်တော်က သူရိုက်တာကို ခံရတယ်။
စာအုပ်က ဖတ်ခံရတယ်။
စာအုပ်ကို ဖတ်တယ်။
Structures de phrases
ကျွန်တော် ___ ခံရတယ်။
သူ့ရဲ့ ___ ခြင်းကို ခံရသည်။
Real World Usage
Unfollow ခံလိုက်ရတယ် (I was unfollowed).
တရားခံကို ဖမ်းဆီးရမိခြင်း ခံရသည်။ (The suspect was arrested.)
ကျွန်တော် အလုပ်က ထုတ်ခံရတယ်။ (I was fired.)
The 'Victim' Test
Avoid Inanimate Objects
Being Loved
Smart Tips
Ask yourself: 'Is this bad news?' If yes, use ခံရ. If no, use active voice.
Add 'gyin' before 'khan ya' to turn the verb into a noun first.
Put the agent right before the verb and add 'ta' to the verb.
Prononciation
Khan-Ya Tone
The word 'Khan' (ခံ) is in the descending/heavy tone, while 'Ya' (ရ) is usually short and neutral when used as an auxiliary.
Emphasis on the Verb
ရိုက် ↘ ခံရတယ်
The emphasis is usually on the action that was suffered.
Mémorise-le
Moyen mnémotechnique
Think of 'Khan' as 'Can't escape it' and 'Ya' as 'You got it'. You got the action and you couldn't escape the impact!
Association visuelle
Imagine a person standing under a rain cloud. The rain (the verb) is falling on them, and they are just standing there 'receiving' it. The cloud is the agent, the rain is the verb, and the person is the subject with ခံရ.
Rhyme
When an action comes your way, add ခံရ (khan-ya) to save the day!
Story
A thief (Agent) stole a bag. But the thief was caught (Passive) by the police. In the first part, the thief is active. In the second part, the thief is the 'victim' of the law, so we use ခံရ.
Word Web
Défi
Write three things that happened to you today using ခံရ. For example: 'I was bitten by a mosquito' or 'I was called by my boss'.
Notes culturelles
Using the passive voice can sometimes be a polite way to avoid directly blaming someone. Instead of saying 'You broke this', saying 'This was broken' (using a different structure) or 'I was affected by this' can soften the blow.
The word ခံ (khan) dates back to Old Burmese, meaning 'to support' or 'to bear weight'.
Amorces de conversation
မနေ့က အလုပ်မှာ ဘာအခက်အခဲတွေ ကြုံခဲ့ရလဲ?
ကျောင်းတုန်းက ဆရာဆူတာ ခံရဖူးလား?
မင်းရဲ့ ဖုန်း အခိုးခံရရင် ဘာလုပ်မလဲ?
Sujets d'écriture
Erreurs courantes
Test Yourself
ကျွန်တော် ဆရာ့ဆူတာ __ တယ်။
Find and fix the mistake:
သူကို အရိုက်ခံရတယ်။
Choose the correct passive sentence:
I was cheated.
Answer starts with: ကျွ...
Score: /4
Exercices pratiques
4 exercisesကျွန်တော် ဆရာ့ဆူတာ __ တယ်။
Find and fix the mistake:
သူကို အရိုက်ခံရတယ်။
Choose the correct passive sentence:
I was cheated.
Score: /4
FAQ (6)
Technically yes, but it sounds like the book was a burden. It's better to say `ကျွန်တော့်ကို စာအုပ်ပေးတယ်` (They gave me a book).
Adding `လိုက်` (laik) emphasizes that the action is completed and often adds a sense of suddenness or finality to the 'suffering'.
Yes, very much so. In news, you will see `ခြင်းခံရသည်` (gyin-khan-ya-thee) used for arrests, appointments, and disasters.
No, but it usually is. You can use it for animals or important objects (like a building being destroyed), but not for trivial things like 'the water was drunk'.
You say `မရိုက်ခံရဘူး` (ma-yaik-khan-ya-bu) or `ရိုက်တာမခံရဘူး`.
Because it usually describes an 'adversary' or a negative situation affecting the subject.
Scaffolded Practice
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Mastery Progress
Needs Practice
Improving
Strong
Mastered
In Other Languages
れる / られる (reru/rareru)
Burmese uses a separate auxiliary verb 'khan', while Japanese uses a verb suffix.
Voz pasiva (ser + participio)
Spanish passive changes based on gender and number; Burmese 'khan ya' is invariant.
Passiv mit 'werden'
German passive is structurally more complex with word order changes (V2 rule).
Majhul (Passive Voice)
Arabic passive is a morphological change; Burmese is a periphrastic construction.
