The Verb 'To Be'

We must talk about a very important note regarding the verb ‘to be’ in Khmer, which is ‘jeea’ ជា. Notice in the above example for ‘I am still hungry’, we actually said ‘I still hungry’ in the Khmer, there was no use of the verb ‘to be’. In Khmer we generally only use the verb ‘to be’ to link nouns and/or pronouns. There are a whole set of words which we would consider to be adjectives in English, but function more like verbs in Khmer. These are generally adjectives to do with feelings. For example, the adjective ‘hungry’ in Khmer is much closer to ‘to be hungry’, and thus we see why we don't need to use the verb ‘to be’ in the sentence. The pronunciation for the verb ‘to be’ is included in the vocabulary for the next dialogue in this chapter.