Esperanto · Chapter 29 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
La korpo: the body, head to foot
Every body part the course owns in one scannable table, the la-instead-of-possessive rule that covers clothes and relatives too, and the doloras-al-mi patterns that make aches sound native.
The short version
La, not mia: the body rule
Esperanto prefers the plain article where the owner is obvious: mi lavis la manojn, not miajn manojn - and PMEG extends the habit to clothes and relatives (diru al la patro). When ambiguity threatens, the fix is the dative reflexive: sxi lavis al si la piedojn. Dropping the possessive is one of the quickest ways to stop sounding translated.
Mi rompis al mi la brakon.
Aches, the native way
Al mi doloras la kapo - the head hurts TO me - is how Esperanto prefers its aches, with the sufferer in the dative and the body part as subject. The compound route works too: mi havas kapdoloron. Both are correct; the dative one marks you as someone who has read more than a phrasebook.
Al li doloras la dorso post la laboro.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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