Learn Burmese from Natural Talk

Hello! Greetings from the Burmese corner! I'm Kenneth Wong, a Burmese language instructor, author, and translator. This is a podcast series for intermediate and advanced Burmese language learners who want to learn Burmese by listening to natural conversation. Every two weeks or so, a guest speaker and I record and upload an episode on a specific topic. At the end of each episode, you'll find the keywords and phrases with their meanings. For more on the podcast series, visit the Learn Burmese from Natural Talk blog: http://burmeselessons.blogspot.com/

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Learn Burmese from Natural Talk

On Diplomacy and Language

November 28, 2025 • kennethwongsf • Season 3 • Episode 57

Imagine this. You’re a diplomat, and in the middle of an embassy cocktail party, you suddenly switch language and speak to your counterpart from the host country in his or her mother tongue, with the kind of fluency that only comes from years of dedicated learning. With that display of earnest interest in the host country's culture, you’re bound to impress those in attendance. Who knows? The favorable impression you’ve made might even help you broker a peace deal or a trade agreement in the future.

My special guest for this episode is linguist, teacher, and translator Ye Min Tun, who has spent more than a decade teaching Burmese to the diplomats heading to Burma. For this episode, we discuss how language and culture knowledge facilitate diplomatic relationships. See if you can pick up a few Burmese words and phrases to help you sound more diplomatic. (Musical excerpts courtesy of Pixabay)

Vocabulary

အထူးဧည့်သည်တော် special guest

နိုင်ငံခြားရေးဝန်ထမ်း foreign service officer, foreign office staff

... [အဖြစ်] တာဝန်ထမ်းဆောင်တယ် to perform duties [as], to serve [in the capacity of], to work [as]

သံတမန် diplomat

အမျိုးသားအကျိုးစီးပွား national & economic interest

ကာကွယ်တယ် to protect

မြှင့်တင်တယ် to promote

မိတ်ဆွေနိုင်ငံ ally nation

ရန်သူနိုင်ငံ enemy nation / hostile nation

ထမင်းစားရေသောက်အဆင့် functional fluency (literally, fluency sufficient for eating and drinking)

ကျွဲကူးရေပါ (figure of speech) when accomplishing the main objective, minor objectives are also accomplished (literally, the water follows when a buffalo swims)

ဖိဖိစီးစီး (adverb) strenuously, intensely

နိုင်ငံရေး politics

စီးပွားရေး economics

သိပ္ပံ science

စိုက်ပျိုးရေး agriculture

ကောင်စစ်ဝန် counsellor / senior diplomat

သင်္ကြန် Thingyan festival, Burmese new year festival

စတုဒိသာ a general feast where anyone is welcome

သံအမတ် ambassador

ဝင်စားတယ် to reincarnate

ကွမ်းသီးကြိုက်သူကိုတောင်ငူပို့ to send a betelnut lover to Taungoo (known for the best betelnut)

ဖုတ်ပူမီးတိုက် (adverb) hurriedly, speedily