Questions & Answers about Mit hoved gør ondt i aften.
Danish has two grammatical genders: common and neuter.
- Common gender nouns use:
- en (indefinite article)
- min / din / sin etc. (possessives)
- Neuter gender nouns use:
- et (indefinite article)
- mit / dit / sit etc. (possessives)
The word hoved (head) is neuter:
- et hoved = a head
So with “my” it must be: - mit hoved = my head
Min hoved is ungrammatical, because min goes with en-words, not et-words.
Gør ondt is a very common fixed expression in Danish meaning “hurts / is painful / aches.”
- gør = does / makes (from at gøre = to do/make)
- ondt = pain / hurt (originally the neuter of ond = evil/bad)
So mit hoved gør ondt literally is like saying “my head does hurt / makes hurt.”
You don’t translate it word‑for‑word into English; you just learn gøre ondt as “to hurt, to ache.”
That sounds wrong in Danish. You normally don’t use ondt with være (er).
Instead, pain is expressed mainly in two ways:
- gøre ondt
- Mit hoved gør ondt = My head hurts.
- have ondt i + body part
- Jeg har ondt i hovedet = I have pain in my head / My head hurts.
Ondt is not used like a normal adjective with være in this context.
Mit hoved er ondt would sound very odd, almost like “my head is evil.”
In this sentence, mit hoved is correct and natural.
- mit hoved = my head (possessive pronoun + indefinite noun)
- hovedet = the head (definite form, without a possessive)
In Danish you generally don’t double-mark with both a possessive and a definite ending, so:
- ✔ mit hoved
- ✔ hovedet
- ✘ mit hovedet
In this particular structure ([possessive] + [noun] + gør ondt), you use the possessive:
- Mit hoved gør ondt.
- Min ryg gør ondt. (My back hurts.)
It’s grammatically correct, but for current pain most Danes would more often say:
- Jeg har ondt i hovedet. – I have a pain in my head / My head hurts.
- Jeg har hovedpine. – I have a headache.
These are the most idiomatic ways to talk about a headache right now.
Mit hoved gør ondt is also used, but slightly less frequently in everyday speech than jeg har ondt i hovedet or jeg har hovedpine, depending on context and style.
Basic neutral word order for a main clause is:
Subject – Verb – Other stuff – Time
Mit hoved – gør – ondt – i aften
So putting i aften at the end is the most neutral order.
You can move it to the front to emphasize “this evening”:
- I aften gør mit hoved ondt. – This evening, my head hurts. (focus on the time)
But if i aften is in first position, Danish V2 word order kicks in: the conjugated verb must be in second position, so gør must come right after i aften. That’s why you cannot say:
- ✘ I aften mit hoved gør ondt. (wrong)
i aften literally means “this evening”, but in natural English it’s often translated as “tonight”, as long as you’re talking about the evening part of tonight, not the middle of the night.
Roughly:
- i aften – this evening / tonight (before you go to bed)
- i nat – tonight / during the night (after you’ve gone to bed, late at night)
So depending on context, both “this evening” and “tonight” are reasonable translations of i aften.
Yes, Danish often uses the present tense for near future if there is a clear time expression:
- Mit hoved gør ondt i aften.
→ My head will hurt this evening / tonight.
However, that future reading is only natural in a context where it makes sense (for example, you know you’ll drink a lot later, or you expect a migraine).
If you want to make the future meaning very explicit, you can use:
- Mit hoved kommer til at gøre ondt i aften.
= My head is going to hurt this evening.
Time expressions in Danish often drop the article and use a fixed preposition + bare noun:
- i aften – this evening / tonight
- i går – yesterday
- i morgen – tomorrow
- i morges – this morning (earlier today)
- i formiddag – this morning (late morning)
So i aften on its own means “this evening.”
If you say:
- i en aften – on an evening (some unspecified evening – quite unusual)
- i aftenen – in the evening (this sounds off; normally you’d say om aftenen = in the evenings / in the evening generally)
For “this evening / tonight”, you should stick with i aften.
Hoved is neuter:
- et hoved – a head
- hovedet – the head
- mit hoved – my head
Unfortunately, in Danish you often just have to learn the gender with each noun. There are some patterns, but they’re not fully reliable.
For hoved, you need to memorize:
- It’s an -et word → et hoved, mit hoved.
In standard Danish, hoved is typically pronounced something like:
- [HO-ð] or [HO-ðə] (very roughly)
Key points:
- The o is long: something like “hoh”.
- The v is very weak and often not clearly heard as a separate [v] sound.
- The final d is a soft d [ð] (like the “th” in this), and it may be very soft or almost disappear in fast speech.
So to an English ear, hoved can sound almost like “ho-ð” or “ho-ðə”, with no clear v or hard d.
Yes, they mean different things:
i aften = this evening / tonight (one specific upcoming or current evening)
- Mit hoved gør ondt i aften. – My head hurts this evening / will hurt this evening.
om aftenen = in the evenings / in the evening (generally, habitually)
- Mit hoved gør ondt om aftenen. – My head (tends to) hurt in the evenings.
So i aften is one particular evening, while om aftenen is more general or habitual.