French · Chapter 11 · Lesson 4 · 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.
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 · 4 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
24-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 4 of 10 in this chapter