B1 · Intermediate Chapter 36

Making It Happen: Causative Verbs

6 Total Rules
1 min
Rules in This Chapter Quick Practice

Chapter in 30 Seconds

Master the art of influence by learning how to describe actions caused by others in Burmese.

  • Form causative verbs to show agency.
  • Distinguish between forcing, allowing, and requesting actions.
  • Apply particles to link cause and effect.
Take control of your sentences by mastering causative agency.

What You'll Learn

Discover how to form causative verbs, indicating that one person causes another to perform an action. This chapter adds a new dimension to expressing agency.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

  1. 1
    By the end you will be able to: Use causative suffixes to describe influencing others' actions.
  2. 2
    By the end you will be able to: Differentiate between 'letting' someone do something and 'forcing' them.

Tips & Tricks (3)

💡

Focus on the root

Always find the base verb root before adding -စေ.
frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Causative Verb Form (Verb + စေသည်)
🎯

The 'Ko' Rule

Always remember the person being allowed is the object. If you forget 'ko', the sentence might mean you are giving permission *to* the action itself, which sounds robotic.
frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Causative with (ပေးသည်) for 'Let/Allow'
💡

The 'Victim' Rule

Use this structure when you want to emphasize that you didn't want to do the action. It's great for making excuses!
frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Passive Causative (လုပ်ခိုင်းခံရသည်)

Key Vocabulary (5)

စေသည် to cause/send ခိုင်းသည် to order/command ပေးသည် to give/let ကြောင့် because of ခံရသည် to suffer/undergo

Real-World Preview

briefcase

At the Office

Review Summary

  • Verb + စေသည်
  • Verb + ခိုင်းသည်

Common Mistakes

Do not stack causative suffixes. Use only one per verb.

Wrong: သူ့ကို စာကျက်ခိုင်းသည် စေသည်
Correct: သူ့ကို စာကျက်စေသည်

Passive causative requires the 'khine' (order) root.

Wrong: သူ့ကို အလုပ်လုပ်ခံရသည်
Correct: သူ့ကို အလုပ်လုပ်ခိုင်းခံရသည်

Must use the verb + 'တဲ့' before the particle 'ကြောင့်'.

Wrong: မိုးကြောင့် အိမ်ပြန်သည်
Correct: မိုးရွာတဲ့ကြောင့် အိမ်ပြန်သည်

Next Steps

You have mastered the power of agency in Burmese! Keep using these structures to gain more confidence in your speech.

Write a list of 5 things you make your pets or friends do.

Continue to: Sequencing Events: Expressing 'Before' and 'After'

Quick Practice (10)

Find the error: 'သူက စာဖတ်ခံရခိုင်းတယ်။'

Find and fix the mistake:

သူက စာဖတ်ခံရခိုင်းတယ်။

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: b
The order is wrong. It should be 'khaing' then 'khan ya'.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Passive Causative (လုပ်ခိုင်းခံရသည်)

Choose the correct sentence.

Which is correct?

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: သူ့ကို သွားစေတယ်
Needs object marker and causative.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Causative Verbs with Nouns

Fix the error.

Find and fix the mistake:

သူ့ကို သွားခိုင်းစေပါ

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: သူ့ကို သွားခိုင်းပါ
Don't mix causative forms.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Making Someone Do Something (လုပ်ခိုင်းသည်)

Choose the correct sentence

Which is correct?

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: သူ့ကို စားအောင်လုပ်
Correct word order.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: The Particle (အောင်) in Causative Constructions

Fill the blank

သူ့ကို စာဖတ်___ လုပ်ပါ။

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: အောင်
The particle 'အောင်' is required.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: The Particle (အောင်) in Causative Constructions

Fill in the blank.

သူ့ကို ___ စေတယ်။

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: သွား
Use the base form.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Causative Verbs with Nouns

Fix the sentence.

Find and fix the mistake:

သူ့ကို စားခဲ့စေတယ်။

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: သူ့ကို စားစေတယ်
Base form required.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Causative Verbs with Nouns

Correct the word order: 'ခွင့်ပေး သွား ကျွန်တော့်ကို' (Let me go).

Find and fix the mistake:

ခွင့်ပေး သွား ကျွန်တော့်ကို

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: ကျွန်တော့်ကို သွားခွင့်ပေး
The order is Object + Verb + Permission + Give.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Causative with (ပေးသည်) for 'Let/Allow'

Choose the correct way to say 'Let him eat'.

___ စားခွင့်ပေးလိုက်ပါ။

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: သူ့ကို
The person being allowed must take the object marker 'ko'.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Causative with (ပေးသည်) for 'Let/Allow'

Which is more formal?

Which is more formal?

✓ Correct! ✗ Not quite. Correct answer: သူ့ကို သွားစေပါ
'စေ' is more formal.

frontend.learn_grammar.from_rule: Making Someone Do Something (လုပ်ခိုင်းသည်)

Score: /10

Common Questions (6)

Yes, it is highly productive and works with almost all verbs.
It is neutral, but the auxiliary verb you choose (သည် vs တယ်) determines formality.
No, it is used to make *others* do something.
It can be a request or an instruction depending on the tone.
Yes, in casual speech. သွားပေး can mean 'let me go', but be careful as it can also mean 'go for me'. Context is key.
ခွင့်ပြု (khwint pyu) is more formal and often used in writing or official announcements, while ခွင့်ပေး is common in spoken language.
Previous Chapter
Actions Done to Others: Passive Constructions
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Sequencing Events: Expressing 'Before' and 'After'
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