Dialogue: At the Doctor

A visit to the doctor turns on a single, very un-English idea: in Czech, the person who feels something is usually not the grammatical subject. Your head does the hurting to you; sickness is to you. This page close-reads a short doctor's-office exchange to pull apart the two experiencer patterns — the accusative one with bolet "to hurt" and the dative one with je mi "I feel" — that together cover almost everything you'll need to say when you're unwell.

The text

Lékař: Dobrý den, co vás bolí? Pacientka: Bolí mě hlava a je mi špatně.

The doctor (lékař) greets the patient (pacientka, a woman) and asks what's wrong: "Hello, what's hurting you? — I have a headache and I feel sick." Read literally, the Czech says something far stranger: "What pains you? — The head pains me and it is badly to me."

Word by word

Line 1 — Co vás bolí?

• Co — "what," in the nominative. Crucially, this is the grammatical subject — the thing that does the hurting.
• vás — "you," in the accusative. The person is the object of the pain, the one it happens to. This is the formal/plural "you"; to a friend it's tě.
• bolí — 3rd person of bolet "to hurt, to pain." Its subject is co "what"; the sufferer sits in the accusative.

Line 2 — Bolí mě hlava a je mi špatně.

• Bolí — bolet again, 3rd person; its subject this time is hlava.
• mě — "me," accusative — the experiencer, the one in pain.
• hlava — "head," nominative: the grammatical subject of bolet. Czech says "the head pains me."
• a — "and."
• je — 3rd person singular of být "to be," impersonal "it is."
• mi — "to me," dative — the experiencer of the feeling.
• špatně — adverb "badly." Je mi špatně = literally "it is badly to me," idiomatically "I feel sick."

Grammar in action

bolet — the head hurts me

Czech doesn't say "I have a headache." It says the body part hurts me: the body part is the nominative subject, and you are the accusative object. The skeleton is:

[body part — nominative] + bolí + [person — accusative]

and word order is flexible, so Bolí mě hlava and Hlava mě bolí are both fine.

This flips English completely. Where English makes the sufferer the subject ("I have a headache," "my head hurts"), Czech makes the body part the subject and pushes the person into the accusative. There's a hidden bonus: because mě already means the pain is yours, you don't add "my" — Bolí mě hlava, never "my head." The verb bolet is one of a small family that govern the accusative this way, covered on accusative-governing verbs.

je mi špatně — the dative of feeling

The second pattern is the dative experiencer. To describe how you feel — sick, cold, hot, better — Czech uses an impersonal je "it is" plus an adverb, and marks the person with the dative:

je + [person — dative] + [adverb]

Here the person is in the dative (mi "to me"), not the accusative. So the two experiencer patterns split cleanly by case, and choosing the wrong one is a giveaway:

The pronoun forms you need

Because the person is an object, you use the object pronouns — and you need both the accusative set (for bolet) and the dative set (for je mi):

Plural body parts

When more than one body part hurts, the subject of bolet goes plural. The neat detail: bolet belongs to the verb class where the 3rd-person singular and plural are identical — both bolí — so the verb never visibly changes even when the subject is plural:

Several of these body parts are old dual forms with irregular plural endings — oči "eyes," uši "ears," ruce "hands/arms," nohy "legs/feet" — a relic of the grammatical dual Czech once used for paired things. They're worth learning as a set; see body-part duals.

Usage note

At the surgery, expect Co vás bolí? "what's hurting you?" and Jak se cítíte? "how do you feel?" (the latter with the reflexive cítit se). You answer with Bolí mě… for pain, Je mi… for general states, and a third pattern, Mám… "I have…" + accusative, for named ailments: Mám horečku "I have a fever," Mám rýmu "I have a cold," Mám kašel "I have a cough." If you say how you feel with an adjective, it agrees with your gender: a man says Cítím se unavený "I feel tired," a woman Cítím se unavená. Keep the three frames apart — bolet (accusative), je mi (dative), mám (accusative possession) — and you can describe nearly any symptom.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• bolet "to hurt" makes the body part the nominative subject and the person the accusative object: Bolí mě hlava "the head pains me."
• "How you feel" uses impersonal je
  • the dative person + an adverb: Je mi špatně, Je mi zima, Je mi líp.
• The two patterns split by case — accusative for bolet (mě, tě, ho), dative for je mi (mi, ti, mu).
• You're never the grammatical subject of these feeling-verbs, and you don't add "my" to the body part.
• bolet shows the same form (bolí) for singular and plural subjects; paired body parts (oči, uši, ruce, nohy) have irregular dual-origin plurals.