me dueles ?
Gurus
As much as I love this song its giving me a headache grammatically speaking.
First I simply assumed it means "You hurt me" and it seemed to make perfect sense. Then my Spanish buddy throws me off again by saying "No it's Me Duele !" I told him the song was called "Me Dueles" but he insists that's not correct.
According to him the verb "doler" is used to say "I'm hurting" or "I'm hurt" or "My arm hurts" and so forth. Me duele el brazo.
I asked him how to say "You hurt me" and he said "Me lastimas" for example.
What bugs me tremendously is that a band from Spain such as La Quinta would sing something totally wrong ? I mean they must know right ? What does "Me dueles" sound like to a native speaker ?
Assuming it really is wrong then how would I know ? I can't find anything in the dictionary that shows me that the word "doler" cannot be used to hurt someone else. The only hint I guess I have is that it has no examples in there saying "You hurt me" but then again a dictionary cannot mention every single way a word is used. I probably have to learn how to read a dictionary better.
Any feedback is appreciated !
Thanks
71 Answers
OMG ! I can't believe how much one can discuss a 2 word sentence. This is what makes language soo different from Math. Thanks everybody for all the good input.
Lucent you are the second person who came up with this totally different idea. "You are in pain and because I'm so close to you I'm in pain"
But that is totally different from. "It pains me to think of you". Now we're shifting from talking about her to really talking about him and then her by association. A massive difference if you ask me !
My Collins dictionary is about 4 months old and is on its latest revision. It claims to be most up2date of all. (Well they all do). I can't believe it'd be totally out of date.
I have no trouble detecting reflexive usage of a verb since subject and object are the same. It's transitive vs. intransitive that I cannot always tell apart. Doesn't it bug anybody that the Collins also lables doler as transitive ?
Can anybody then give me a transitive example using doler ? There must be one since I refuse to believe that a modern dictionary is 100% wrong.
I'd say that the statement :
"Doler can only be translated to hurt when it means to feel pain in a part of your body"
directly conflicts with the "vt" label does it not ?
Me duele la cabeza
It would help to translate it to "My head hurts me". And remember that doler can only be translated to "hurt" when it means:
to feel pain in a part of your body (not to injure someone or cause them pain or to cause emotional pain to someone)
Tell me where it hurts.
She says that her ear hurts her.
Dont worry so much. It is a piece of art,all rules are discarded. A lot of songs are not gramatically correct,except for Pat Boones's songs of the '50.
You Collins dictionary gives:
doler vt,vi to hurt (fig); to grieve dolerse vr (de su situación) to grieve
...but it seems to me from many discussions here (which is where I have first started learning a bit more about modern grammar) that "vr" should be verbo pronominal
The site I am referencing here comes from the University of Texas (I am currently in Austin) pronominal verbs and the explanation is from a professor of French, but I think the explanation is good. Spanish Language Pronominal Verbs indicates that so-called "reflexive verbs" are but one type of pronominal verb.....and of course, the verb that then acts on the subject would be transitive, I guess.
So it seems to me that your Collins dictionary may be out-of-step with modern ways of presenting the information. Could that be?
On another note, you wrote that you were back at square one.....But surely that is not quite true. Not only you, but all of us have learned a lot from your thread!! Just look at your own quote to see how "study101" (pardon me once again) has studied and come to a deeper understanding even perhaps of how other people think!
Intransitive sentences like "Me duele" or "Me gusta" do NOT translate into "It hurts me" or "It pleases me" There is no "IT" that does the action of hurting or pleasing me even though it's soooo tempting to think of it this way right ?
And you continued to say:
Even though in English we translate it that way the native Spanish ear hears something like "I'm hurting/in pain".
I have often wondered if language affects how one sees the world. We say "the sky is blue" and maybe in another language blue is something that the sky does, which I would not understand. (That is an example, I don´t know so many languages and nothing at all about linguistics...it just occurred to me as an example.)
And you brought us Heidita's terrific post that clears up so much for so many of us too.
Hi again Stucky101, Sorry I got your name wrong before. By the way, "Study101" does seem to fit! You really are studying to get this right!! kudos.
But now let me return to your thread. You wrote:
but I can just as well say "Du tust mir weh" meaning "You hurt me".
Isn´t it interesting that here the German might even instead be saying "I feel sorry for you" with "Du tust mir leid." Well, I will leave this thought because we are at SpanishDict.com, but I thought it particularly interesting that because your language has this similar form, you do not find such forms as strange as do perhaps some of the other forum members. And you can see that maybe we need a language historian to understand just why certain words being of the structure that they are, such as "doler" being intransitive. So "me dueles" seems to be at least strange, if not for someone -- at least not for your songwriters out of the question.
Of course songwriters (and not just modern pop ones) do not always pay much attention to grammar when they need to rhyme. I can think of older songs from my parents' generation (before rock and roll) that employ "for you and I" (yikes!) in order to rhyme..(poor excuse for a lack of imagination, I suppose.)
I've been reading over this again. So now I'm beginnig to think she doesn't wanna say "You hurt me" in the first place cause then she could have very well used "me dañas" which is also a 2 syllable word so it should have worked for the song just as well. So let me get this straight. Rather than expressing the act of being hurt by a person she simply wants to express that she is hurting now and it has to do with another person but that person is not doing anything specific to her now.
Is that any closer ? There must be a reason why she picked "me dueles" over "me dañas" and it's driving me mad that I don't get it.
May its short for "Me duele porque me dañabas" and she wanted to squeeze that into one short statement instead ? Am I onto something here ?
Does anybody have a good English equivalent that would help me ?
(Pulling my hair out again)
Heidita
Thanks for clear explanation ! Let me guess
Me duelen los zapatos - My shoes are in pain.
Right ?
So you'd agree that they are using the word "doler" for something it is not designed to express.
The thing is that must sound totally ghetto to the Spanish ear no ?
I wonder why they can get away with it and why they did't choose the correct expression using daño. Its as if they wanna express something that daño just doesn't express.
My conclusion is that it's grammatically definitely wrong and doesn't even make sense yet any speaker can totally see what they're trying to say. Why did they do that ? That'll be a mystery to me forever.
One more thing to clarify then :
Intransitive sentences like "Me duele" or "Me gusta" do NOT translate into "It hurts me" or "It pleases me" There is no "IT" that does the action of hurting or pleasing me even though it's soooo tempting to think of it this way right ? Eventhough in English we translate it that way the native Spanish ear hears something like "I'm hurting/in pain".
Does this explain the intrinsic connection between those verbs and 3rd person sing/plural ? Is that why those verbs never seem to be used with 1st or 2nd person ? If that's true then why do these verbs "bother" having conjugated forms other than 3rd person sing/plural ?
Take a word like "llover". There simply is no such conjugation as "llovo" since "I rain" doesn't make any sense. This I can totally understand. So why is it then that gustar,faltar or doler have a full conjugation table when most entries in it cannot be used ever ?
Heidita please help !
you hurt me = me hieres,/ me lastimas
My Oxford doesn't even flag doler as reflexive at all. Instead it only flags it as intransitive
Look at our dictionary. It shows intransitive, pronominal, and reflexive use of the verb.
Yo te duelo, is not possible. It does not translate to : I am hurting you, as doler is intranstive.
Heidita,
I'm not going to argue whether the sentence is possible or not, because if looks rather specious to me, also ( I don't know how you would decide if the te was an i.o.p or d.o.p.)? I would argue against your reasoning, however. The fact that the verb is intransitive (in Spanish) doesn't mean that it can't translate into a transitive use.
Me gustan manzanas. (intransitive verb in Spanish).
Common translation.
I like apples. (transitive verb in English or so it would seem, I need to research if to like is a true transitive verb).
She likes this or that sure sounds transitive to me.
(I did so some research. It still seems transiitve to me in English. It's seems to be a linking verb and the compliment seems to be a d.o. so it can't be intransitive).
Guys
Thanks for all the input ! So to summarize : Oftentimes a verb will be transitive in English but intransitive in Spanish or the other way. In this case
doler - vi to be translated to hurt - vt
I guess the big problem for me is to see the difference when almost all pronouns are the same DO or IO. For example
Me hace - it makes me (transitive - so "me" is a DOP) vs. Me duele - I'm hurting (intransitive - so "me" is an IOP)
Correct ? You do see why I'm confused right ? So its wrong to think of "Me duele" as "It hurts me" since that makes it look transitive. Then again it IS transitive in the English translation. Damn this is hard.
Janice you are right I can say "Es tut mir weh" meaning "it hurts me" but I can just as well say "Du tust mir weh" meaning "You hurt me". This whole tread started only because I'm now under the impression that this cannot be done in Spanish using "doler" and yet people do it and even say that there is nothing wrong with it when my buddy from Barcelona insists it isn't right.
So one more time :
Is "Me duele" supposed to describe the action of hurting being directed at me or simply describing the fact that I'm hurting without focusing on where it came from ? Is "Me dueles" an attempt to describe the source of the pain eventhough "doler" doesn't really provide for this ? Is "Me dueles" a way to force "doler" into transitive mode so we can get the source of the pain or is it still intransitive ?
Sorry I wish I could say I get it but no tengo suerte.
Even though you've completely trashed my assertions, thanks for the enlightenment, Heidita. 
I (just barely) understand doler now. (I thought I understood it before or I wouldn't have made the other comments).
Me duele la cabeza => For me the head feels pain => My head hurts
An English speaker would prefer to say mi cabeza duele just like we would prefer to say ato mis zapatos and not me ato los zapatos.
The way Spanish uses pronouns drives me bonkers. How me works in me duele la cabeza just barely feels like an indirect object. In English, an indirect object receives the direct object, which receives the action of the verb, but that really doesn't seem to apply here -- as there is no direct object.
So, I guess an indirect object could be consider the object for whom the action is performed...like the head was doing this whole hurting thing for my benefit or something. I dunno.
