Some homegrown businesses and neighborhood restaurants flourish in Burma, thanks for the power of viral posts and social media. But fake news of levitating monks and strange omens also spread online, like wildfire. While not exactly fake news, inaccurate news and old news also tend to resurface from time to time, stirring up racial tension or raising false hopes. In this episode of Learn Burmese from Natural Talk, my cohost Mol Mol from BLAY (Burmese Language Academy of Yangon) and I discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of social media. (Photo by Lanlao, licensed from Shutterstock. Music courtesy of Pixabay)

Vocabulary

ကောင်းကျိုး benefits
ဆိုးကျိုး negative impact
မီးပုံးပျံ aerial balloon
ရင်တထိတ်ထိတ် anxiously (adverb, literally, with the heart beating fast)
လူမှုရေးကွန်ရက် social network
လူမှုရေး social
ကွန်ရက် / ပိုက်ကွန် network
သတင်းမှား fake news
ကောလာဟလ rumors
ပွဲဆူအောင် to stir up things
ပဋိပက္ခ riot, conflict
ဆဲလဖီ ဆွဲတယ် to take selfie
ဆဲလဖီ တင်တယ် to post selfie
ဆဲလီ celebrity
ဝေခွဲလို့မရဘူး cannot determine
ဈာန်ကြွတယ် to levitate, to float by spiritual means
Google ခေါက်တယ် to search in Google
Google လိုက် go ahead and use Google
နှလုံးရောဂါ heart disease
သုံးသပ်တယ် to analyze
ချဉ်းကပ်တယ် to approach
စကားချိုသွေးတယ် to sweet-talk
ဂျင်းမိတယ် to be deceived, to be taken advantage of (slang)
ဂျင်းထည့်တယ် to deceive, to take advantage of (slang)
ပေါက်သွားတယ် to become popular, to go viral online (slang)
ကျမ်းကိုးကျမ်းကား cited sources
ငွေသား cash, money
ပိတ်ပင်တားဆီး to forbid

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