Teashop Culture in Burma

Welcome to another episode of Learn Burmese from Natural Talk!

In Burmese teashops, have you ever listened closely to how regular customers order tea, and how the waiters and waitresses relay these orders to the kitchen? What do people mean when they ask for cho pawt, pawt kya, pawt seint, kyauk badaung or see lone tea? What type of people tend to frequent curbside teashops, set up under leafy tress at the busy intersections? And what about the more modern cafes with the air-conditioned, colorful interiors, ideal for your Instagram selfies? What type of people do they attract?

To find out, listen to our third episode, where Burmese teacher Mol Mol from BLAY (Burmese Language Academy of Yangon) and I discussed Burma’s teashop culture. At the end of our chat, we gave you the meanings of the key words and phrases we used in our chat. Join us or a cup of tea! (Music clips courtesy of Uppbeat.)

Vocabulary for talking about teashop culture

လက်ဖက်ရည်ဆိုင်ထိုင်တယ် to hang out in a teashop

အလေ့အကျင့် habit

ကျတယ် to be heavily caffeinated

စိမ့်တယ် to be rich in flavor

ပေါ့တယ် to be lightly flavored

ကျစိမ့် caffeinated and richly flavored

ချိုပေါ့ lightly sweetened

ကျောက်ပတောင်း name of an extremely sweet and thick tea

နှပ်တယ် to brew (tea or coffee)

စီလုံတီး a special type of tea made with boiled milk (instead of condensed milk)

မလိုင် milk cream

လူလတ်တန်းစား middle class

လမ်းဘေးလက်ဖက်ရည်ဆိုင် curbside teashop

နေရာထိုင်ခင်း setup, interior

ဝန်ဆောင်မှု services and amenities

အီကြာကွေး fried donut sticks (Chinese origin)

လူတန်းစား social class

selfie ဆွဲတယ် to take selfie

ရင်ဖွင့်တယ် to open up emotionally

လေကန်တယ် to chitchat

အာလာပ သလ္လာပ general conversation topics

အာဘောင်အာရင်းသန်သန် vociferously, energetically

ငြင်းကြခုန်ကြတယ် to debate

ထွေရာလေးပါး general topics

အတင်းအဖျင်း gossips

အာနိသင် essence 

ရေနွေးကြမ်း plain tea

မျက်စောင်းထိုးတယ် to give a dirty look

မကြည်ဘူး to be disgruntled

နှပ်ကော်ဖီ slow-brewed coffee

လေအေးစက် air conditioner