What is your favorite bedtime story? Cinderella? Snow White? For Burmese kids, most likely it’s a story associated with a proverb, like Maung Po and the Tiger, or one of the jatakas, a retelling of the Buddha’s past lives that brought him to enlightenment. In this episode, I speak to A Zun Mo, the coauthor of Burmese Stories for Language Learners, published by Tuttle. Want to know why people pray for the angle May Khalar when they’re in a pinch? Want to know why the Burmese say, Maung Po and the Tiger should go back to the way they were? A Zun Mo is here to explain these. (Photo licensed from Shutterstock: Girl reading with light inside a pagoda in Bagan, by Nuttavut Sammongkol; Music clips from Uppbeat.io)

Vocabulary

ပုံပြင် fable, story
ဘုရားလောင်း Boddhisatva, someone destined to become buddha
မဟာဇနက္က / မဟာဇနက Maha Zanaka, a prince in a Buddhist parable
ရွှေသွေး Shwe Thway, a weekly journal for children
ဇာတ်တော်ကြီးဆယ်ဘွဲ့ Ten Jatakas based on Buddha’s past lives
ခြုံငုံပြီး to sum up, to speak to summary
နတ်သမီး goddess, female deity
သမုဒ္ဒရာ ocean
ပန်းတိုင် goal
ဇွဲ / လုံ့လ determination, perseverance
ကုန်သည် merchant
စာသင်သားတွေအတွက် ရည်ရွယ်တယ် intended for language learners
မဏိမေခလာကို တမ်းတတယ် to long for the goddess May Khala
ပိုနေမြဲ ကျားနေမြဲ Maung Po and the tiger are back to where they were, a proverb
စကားပုံ proverb
ထောင်ချောက် trap
ကျေးဇူးကန်းတယ် to be ungrateful
ရုပ်ပြစာအုပ် graphics novel, illustrated book
ကျန်စစ်သား Kyansittha, the name of a king from the Bagan Dynasty
ရာဇကုမာရ် Rajakumar, the name of a prince from the Bagan Dynasty
ခိုင်ခိုင်မာမာ solidly, firmly
ဘာသာဗေဒ linguistics
ကောက်ကာငင်ကာ suddenly, spontaneously
ကျွတ်သွားတယ် to have found salvation (used when discussing ghosts and spirits)

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