Language/French/Grammar/il-or-ça-with-impersonal-verbs
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il or ça with impersonal verbs
Some impersonal verbs and verbal expressions have il as subject in written French, but il or ça may occur in spoken French; ça is used in informal styles. Some weather verbs behave in this way:
- Il pleut, ça pleut
It's raining
- Il neige, ça neige
It's snowing
- Il gèle, ça gèle
It's freezing
- Il limine, ça bruine
It's drizzling
- Il/ça se peut que la carte soit démagnétisée
Perhaps the card has lost its magnetism
- Il/ça n'empêche pas qu'elle ait raison
That doesn't stop her from being right
- Il/ça suffit de voir ce qui se passe
You only have to see what's happening
Don't miss the chance to check out these pages as you wrap up this lesson: Possessive determiners, Omission of the article, The irregular verb avoir & The French Alphabet.
Other Lessons[edit | edit source]
- Marked use of tu
- Adjectives modified by adverbs and prepositional phrases
- Common quantifiers
- Agreement of past participle if direct object is placed before
- Adverbs ending in —ment derived from the masculine form of an adjective
- Plurals
- Categories of Nouns in French
- Infinitives
- il or ça alternating with noun phrase subjects
- Pronominal verbs, the auxiliary “être” and the agreement of the past participle
- Verbs with intransitive and transitive uses
- Masculine and feminine forms of adjectives — A change in written, but not spoken
- Gender
- Relative pronouns
- Adjectives with complements