Health and Illness

Cold symptoms and headache

感冒 (gǎnmào: to catch a cold) is a compound verb, often used with 了 to say that someone has caught a cold: 感冒了 (gǎnmào le: has caught a cold). The two characters are not separable: 感 is read gǎn and 冒 is read mào (tone 4), and both must be written correctly. Homophones such as 敢 (gǎn: to dare) and 赶 (gǎn: to catch up, to chase) do not combine with 冒 into a word for catching a cold, so only 感 is correct. The Sino-Vietnamese reading of this word is 'cảm mạo'.

When indicating pain in the head, use the character 头 (tóu: head), a noun for a body part. Do not confuse it with 投 (tóu: to throw, to vote), which has the same sound but does not denote a body part. Two commonly encountered expressions are 头疼 (tóuténg: to have a headache) and 头很疼 (tóu hěn téng: the head hurts a lot), where 很 (hěn: very) comes before the adjective 疼 (téng: painful) and 头 serves as the subject of the clause.

Some sample examples:

• 头疼 (tóuténg: to have a headache) — 他昨晚喝了很多酒，今天早上头疼得厉害。 (Last night he drank a lot of alcohol, and this morning he had a severe headache.)
• 感冒 (gǎnmào: to catch a cold) — 天冷了，小孩子很容易感冒。 (The weather is cold, and children catch colds very easily.)
• 咳嗽 (késou: to cough) — 感冒以后他一直咳嗽，睡不好觉。 (After catching a cold, he kept coughing and could not sleep well.)