Questions & Answers about Me duele el brazo después de nadar.
Why do we say me duele el brazo instead of duele mi brazo?
In Spanish, doler works like gustar: the thing that causes pain (here, el brazo) is the subject, and the person who feels it is marked by an indirect object pronoun (me = “to me”). Literally it’s “the arm hurts me.” If you said duele mi brazo, you’d be treating mi brazo as an object, which doesn’t fit this structure.
What kind of verb is doler, and why is it conjugated as duele here?
Doler is an impersonal verb that takes an indirect object. It agrees in number with the thing causing pain. Since el brazo is singular, you use the third-person singular form duele. If you had more than one arm (hypothetically!), you’d say me duelen los brazos.
Why is there a me at the beginning of the sentence?
Me is the indirect object pronoun for first person (“to me” or “for me”). It tells us who is experiencing the pain. In Spanish, indirect object pronouns normally come before the verb.
Why do we use el brazo (definite article) instead of mi brazo?