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.