Le corps et la santé

Ask an English speaker to translate my head hurts and you will get ma tête fait mal or j'ai mal à ma tête. Both are understood. Both are wrong, and wrong in a way that marks a beginner inside one sentence.

The rule

With parts of the body, French uses the definite article where English uses a possessive.

• J'ai mal à la tête. My head hurts.
• Il a levé la main. He raised his hand.
• Elle a fermé les yeux. She closed her eyes.

Not ma tête, not sa main, not ses yeux. The article carries it.

Why it holds together

The sentence has already said whose body it is. J'ai is a first person; there is nobody else whose head could be hurting. French treats the possessive as redundant and drops it, in the same spirit it drops a good deal else.

This is not an isolated quirk. Once you have it, it applies everywhere the body appears, and it keeps applying through the more detailed body session later in the course.

When the owner is not obvious

Where the sentence does not already establish whose body part it is, French adds a pronoun rather than a possessive:

• Il me prend la main. He takes my hand.
• On lui a coupé les cheveux. They cut his hair.

The me and the lui say who. The article still stays definite. English speakers reach for sa main here, and it always sounds translated.

Saying what is wrong

Avoir mal à is the workhorse: j'ai mal au dos, j'ai mal aux dents. Watch the contraction, à + le gives au and à + les gives aux. Getting that wrong is more audible than getting the article wrong in the first place.

Être malade is to be ill in general. Avoir mal is to hurt somewhere specific. They are not interchangeable, and je suis mal means something nearer to I am in a bad way, which is rarely what you meant.

Medecin or docteur

Un médecin is the profession. Docteur is the title you use to address one: bonjour docteur. You go chez le médecin, not au médecin, because you are going to somebody's place rather than to a building.