Questions & Answers about У мене болить потилиця.
Why does Ukrainian use у мене here instead of я?
Because the sentence is built differently from English.
In Ukrainian, with body-part pain, the painful body part is usually the grammatical subject, and the person is expressed separately with у/в + genitive:
- У мене болить потилиця.
- literally: At me the back of the head hurts
So Ukrainian is not saying I hurt. It is saying the back of my head hurts, with у мене showing whose body part it is.
What case is мене, and why?
Here мене is genitive singular after у.
The pattern у мене means something like at me / with me / in my case, and in this use у takes the genitive.
A useful thing to remember is that мене has the same form in both the genitive and accusative, but in this sentence it is functioning as genitive.
Why is the verb болить in the 3rd person singular? Shouldn't it agree with I?