Verbs (19) - Modal Verbs

4. Can, Could and Could have

Can, could နဲ႔ ေမးခြန္းလုပ္ရင္ ေနာက္က subject ေလးေတြ ထည့္ေပးရတယ္။

Can I…? Can you….? Could I….? Could you….? စသည္ေပါ့။

Negative ေျပာခ်င္ရင္ေတာ့ spoken English မွာ can’t, writing English မွာ cannot လို႔သံုးတယ္။ စကားေျပာရာမွာ cannot လို႔ တစ္ခါတစ္ရံေတာ့ ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အဓိပၸါယ္က အားပါတဲ့အေျပာမ်ိဳးသက္ေရာက္တယ္ (emphatic)။

Couldn’t in spoken, could not in writing but we sometimes say could not.

Can, can’t ကို စြမ္းရည္ (ability) အေၾကာင္းေျပာတဲ့အခါ သံုးတယ္။

Maria can speak four languages.

I can’t swim but my sister can.

ျဖစ္ႏုိင္၊ မျဖစ္ႏုိင္ (possible/ impossible) ဆုိတာ ေျပာဖုိ႔လဲသံုးတယ္။

Learning English can be difficult. (Learning English is sometimes difficult).

Children can be very naughty. (Children are sometimes very naughty).

It’s still light. It can’t be bedtime.

ေတာင္းဆုိခ်က္၊ ေတာင္းဆုိခ်က္ကိုျငင္းပယ္တာေတြအတြက္လဲသံုးတယ္။ (requests and refusals of requests)

Can I go home now?

You can go whenever you like.

You can borrow the car today, but you can’t have it tomorrow.

တစ္ေယာက္ေယာက္ကို ကူညီဖုိ႔ ကမ္းလွမ္းတဲ့အခါသံုးတယ္။

Can I help you?

Can I help bag that for you?

Could, couldn’t ကုိ the past tense of can, can’t အျဖစ္သံုးတယ္။

စြမ္းရည္ (ability)အေၾကာင္းေျပာရင္သံုးတယ္။

I could run very fast when I was younger.

She couldn’t get a job anywhere.

Possible, impossible အေၾကာင္းေျပာရင္သံုးတယ္။

Our teacher could be very strict when we were at school. (Some teachers were very strict).

People could starve in those days. (People sometimes starved).

You couldn’t use computers in the nineteenth century.

Polite request လုပ္ဖုိ႔သံုးတယ္။

Could I go now please?

Could you lend me a dictionary please?

Polite offer လုပ္ဖို႔ သံုးတယ္။

Could I give you a lift? (ကားနဲ႔ပုိ႔ေပးရမလား)

I could carry that for you. (ငါသယ္ေပးမယ္ေလ)

Could have ကို အခုျဖစ္ခ်င္ျဖစ္မယ္၊ သို႔မဟုတ္ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့တစ္ခ်ိန္ခ်ိန္က ျဖစ္ခ်င္ျဖစ္မယ္ဆိုတာေလးေျပာဖုိ႔သံုတယ္။

It’s ten o’clock. They could have arrived now. (ေရာက္ေလာက္ၿပီ) အခုေရာက္တာလဲ ျဖစ္ခ်င္ျဖစ္မယ္၊ ဒီအရင္ေလးက ေရာက္တာလဲ ျဖစ္ခ်င္ျဖစ္မယ္ေပါ့။ သူတို႔ အခုေလာက္ဆုိ ေရာက္ၿပီလို႔ ေျပာတာ။

They could have arrived hours ago. (ေရာက္ေနေလာက္ၿပီ) ေတာ္ေတာ္ၾကာၾကာက ေရာက္ေနမယ္၊ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ရင္ အခုေတာ့ ေရာက္ေနေလာက္ၿပီ။