Russian has a verb болеть which means “to hurt, ache,” and another verb болеть which means “to be ill.” That's right: their infinitives are spelled exactly the same, although they are conjugated differently. Today we will discuss the former.

The first thing to notice about the verb “to hurt, ache” is that it is only used in the third person, never in the first or second:

In English we say, “My head hurts.” The Russians phrase it as “at me hurts the head”:

There are а couple things to note here. First of all, the person experiencing the pain shows up in the genitive case as the object of the preposition у. The body part that hurts shows up in the nominative case. Since the body part is the subject, the verb has to agree with it, not with the person who is suffering. If more than one thing hurts, the verb goes in the plural. Thus:

The prefix за- often adds the idea of “start to” to a verb, and the perfective заболеть is not an exception. Here are some examples.

Сердце is the Russian word for that muscular, blood-pumping organ ticking in your chest known as the heart. And, of course, in various cultures around the world it’s not simply an organ, but also a poetic symbol for love and the spiritual being of a person.

Here are a couple of words and a saying that derive from сердце:

Сердечный— This adjective can be used to describe a medical heart condition or warm feelings. When referring to a heart attack, say сердечный приступ, and when mentioning a close, good-natured friend, say сердечный друг. In medicine, cердечный is usually translated as cardiac.

Сердцеед— A perfect word to describe Casanova, Don Juan and other ordinary, skirt-chasing womanizers who constantly break some poor heart. The term is a combination of the words heart and eater, literally translated as “heart-eater”. Сердцеедкa is used to describe a female with the same qualities.

Сердце не лежит— The saying explains the feelings of someone who is resistant, objecting and just not in the mood for something. For example, “y него сердце не лежит к этой профессии,” can be translated as, “His heart is not really in this profession.”

Here’s a short, vacuous dialogue about heartache between a sorrowful man and his doctor friend.

The Russian word for voice is голос. Notice that it is end-stressed in the plural and has an irregular nominative plural:

Here are a few sample sentences:

The other day I was talking with my buddy Юрий when my brain rаn up against a linguistic wall: I didn't know how to say “I lost my voice” in Russian. Of course, a good language student never lets the lack of vocabulary stop him. He just improvises with words he does know. So I said “у меня исчез голос”, literally “at me the voice disappeared.” That made the communicative point and the conversation continued, but I was irked that I didn't really know the way a Russian would normally say it. So I started asking about that concept and here's what I came up with.

First of all, there is the verb хрипнуть/охрипнуть, which covers two concepts in English: “to have/get a hoarse voice” and “to lose one's voice.” The verb is conjugated like this:

Since this verb covers the meaning of two different phrases, sometimes it has two possible translations:

That means that if you are translating something from Russian to English, you might have to pay close attention to context to see whether completely losing the voice or becoming hoarse is the point. Of course, there can't be that many contexts where it's important to distinguish between simply becoming hoarse (partially losing one's voice) and completely losing one's voice, so maybe the issue is mostly moot.

Here's another example:

There are a couple other phrases that mean the same thing. We can use the verb оседать/осесть “to sink” or терять/потерять “to lose.” For instance:

Галитоз is a medical term that means “bad breath.” You may recognize it as meaning the same thing as the English word halitosis. When Russians borrows words based on Latin and Greek roots or words, they usually remove any grammatical ending from the word. Other examples:

Normally when Russians talk about bad breath, they don't use the medical term. Even educated native speakers might not know it. Instead they say «У него плохо пахнет изо рта», which in a word for word paraphrase comes out “At him it smells bad from the mouth.” Sample sentences:

My favorite bad breath phrase in Russian is «У меня во рту как будто эскадрон ночевал» “It's like an [entire] company [of cavalry] spent the night in my mouth.” But that's not the only one. The Russians love to play with language, and they can get quite creative when describing bad breath, for instance…

Warning! The following example contains English vulgarity and русский мат!

There are a lot of versions of this phrase that vary in their degree of nastiness. I was curious which one was the most common, so I googled them all and came up with this hit count (15 May 2009):

Versions 1 and 2 are kiddie talk. Adults may use them to avoid obscenity. #3 uses a fairly neutral word but still gets the point across. 4 and 5 are obscene. Do NOT use them in front of your instructors in Moscow or in front of your host mother.