Verbs (19) - Modal Verbs

6. Can or Could

Possibility

Modal can ကုိ ျဖစ္ႏုိင္ေၾကာင္း ေယဘုယ်ေျပာျပတာေတြအတြက္သံုးတယ္။

It can be very cold in winter. (It is sometimes very cold in winter).

You can easily lose your way in the dark. (People often lose their way in the dark).

Could ကို can ရဲ႕ past tense အျဖစ္သံုးတယ္။

It could be very cold in winter. (It was sometimes very cold in winter).

You could lose your way in the dark. (People often lost their way in the dark).

အနာဂတ္မွာ ျဖစ္ႏုိင္ေျခရွိတယ္၊ ဒါေပမယ့္ မေသခ်ာဘူးဆုိရင္ could ကုိသံုးတယ္။

If we don’t hurry, we could be late. (Perhaps/ Maybe we will be late).

အခု သို႔မဟုတ္ အရင္က ျဖစ္ႏုိင္တာကို ေျပာဖုိ႔ could ကိုသံုးတယ္။

It’s ten o’clock. They could have arrived now.

They could have arrived hours ago.

Impossibility

တစ္ခုခုမျဖစ္ႏိုင္တာကုိေျပာဖုိ႔ can’t/ cannot ကိုသံုးတယ္။

That can’t be true.

You cannot be serious.

အတိတ္အတြက္ couldn’t/ could not ကိုသံုးတယ္။

We knew it could not be true.

He was obviously joking. He could not be serious.

Ability

Can ကို စြမ္းရည္၊ ကၽြမ္းက်င္မႈကိုေျပာဖုိ႔ သံုးတယ္။ (Skills or general abilities)

She can speak several languages.

He can swim like a fish.

They can’t dance very well.

Can ကို (present/ future) ယခု သုိ႔မဟုတ္ ေနာင္တစ္ခ်ိန္ခ်ိန္မွာ တစ္ခုခုလုပ္ႏုိင္စြမ္းရည္ရွိတာကို ေျပာဖုိ႔သံုးတယ္။ (ability to do something)

They can make a lot of money if they are lucky.

Help. I can’t breathe.

They can run, but they can’t hide.

Past အတြက္ could ကုိသံုးတယ္။

She could speak several languages.

They couldn’t dance very well.

Permission

Can ကို တစ္ခုခု လုပ္ဖို႔ခြင့္ေတာင္းရန္ သံုးတယ္။ (permission to do something)

Can I ask a question, please?

Can we go home now?

Could is more formal and polite than can.

Could I ask a question, please?

Could we go home now?

Can ကုိ ခြင့္ျပဳရာမွာလဲ သံုးတယ္။

You can go home now if you like.

You can borrow my pen if you like.

တစ္ခုခု လုပ္ခြင့္ရတာကုိေျပာဖုိ႔လဲ can ကုိသံုးတယ္။

We can go out whenever we want.

Students can travel free.

Instructions and Requests

Could you… ကို တစ္ေယာက္ေယာက္ကို ယဥ္ယဥ္ေက်းေက်း ခုိင္းခ်င္ရင္သံုးတယ္။ (polite way of asking someone to do something)

Could you take a message please?

Could I have my bill please?

Can is less polite.

Can you take a message please?

Offers and Invitations

We use can I… to make offers.

Can I help you?

Can I do that for you?

We sometimes say I can… or I could… to make an offer.

I can do that for you if you like.

I can give you a lift to the station.