French · Chapter 1 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Impersonal verbs
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Three dummy ils, three different jobs
The il in these constructions refers to nothing at all, and the three are not interchangeable. Existence takes il y a, weather takes il fait or il pleut, and the clock takes il est. Il y a trois heures does not tell anyone the time; il est trois heures does.
Il fait beau, mais il y a du vent.
Vaut mieux and vaut la peine are not the same advice
Both are built on valoir, but they answer different questions. Il vaut mieux partir tôt compares the action to an alternative (better than leaving late). Ça vaut la peine d'essayer judges the action against doing nothing at all (worth the effort, full stop).
ça vaut la peine d'essayer
The de after la peine never drops
Il vaut la peine de + infinitive always keeps de, even in the everyday ça-version and even in the negative: ça ne vaut pas la peine de se disputer pour ça. Drop the de and the phrase stops parsing.
il vaut la peine de lire ce livre
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.
Read the full article · 7 min readPractice
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 32 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 8 of 18 in this chapter