Mid-April is when Burmese people celebrate the end of the old year and the beginning of another one with a water festival, similar to the people of Thailand and several other neighboring countries.In modern times, young people driving around in open pickup trucks and shooting water through high-pressure tubes and cannons is the standard practice, but in the old days, people dipped laurel leaves into silver goblets of fragrant water and dabbed them on one another-- a practice that seems quaint now. Also, in Thingyan in bygone times, street performers and dance troupes would come up with call and response routines, called သံချပ် Than Jaat, that celebrate life, welcome the new year, and also take jabs at the authorities’ hypocritical behaviors and corruption. In this episode of Learn Burmese from Natural Talk, my regular guest Su, a Burmese teacher based on Chiang Mai, and I discuss these and more. Vocabularyသင်္ကြန် Burmese water festival သင်္ကြန်ကျပြီ Thingyan has arrivedပြက္ခဒိန် calendar ကျင်းပတယ် to celebrate နံ့သာရည် aromatic waterရင်ဖုံး / ရင်စေ့ bosom-covered / bosom-buttoned blouse style အကြိုနေ့ the pre-arrival, the precursor (to a festival)အကျနေ့ the day of arrival (of a festival)အကြတ်နေ့ the in-between dayအတက်နေ့ the day preceding the end (of a festival)နှစ်ဆန်းတစ်ရက်နေ့ first day of new yearရေသေနတ် / ရေပြွန် water gun / water canon ကုသိုလ်လုပ်တယ် to perform good deedsမဏ္ဍပ် pavilion အတိုင်အဖေါက် call and responseအတိုင်အဖေါက်ညီတယ် the call and response are in syncသံချပ် a call-and-response routineပူဆာတယ် to pester, to repeatedly request အာဏာသိမ်းတယ် to stage a coupသီလယူတယ် to pledge to observe certain precepts အတာအိုး a well-wishing pot with flowers and leaves၇ရက်သားသမီးအတွက် for those born on each of the weekdayခွက်စောင်းခုတ်တယ် to slap a cup of water down with forceဥပုသ်သည် those observing preceptsညိုမြမလုပ်နဲ့ do not play coy, do not pretend to be disinterested မူမနေနဲ့ do not play coy, do not pretend to be disinterested ဈေးကိုင်တယ် to be holding out မုန့်လုံးရေပေါ် sweet rice balls, a specialty of ThingyanHave a question about a Burmese word or phrase you heard here? Send us a message.

Ver todos los episodios