Ch 1 · Lesson 14

Impersonal verbs

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

Weather is something Spanish makes

.

It's cold.
Why?

Spanish says , , , : literally it makes cold, heat, sun, wind. Those are nouns, not adjectives, which is why is wrong for it is cold. A few weather words do take , because they genuinely are adjectives: nublado, .

never goes plural

.

There are three cars in the street.
Why?

means there is and there are, with no change: , . It has no subject, so nothing can pull it into the plural, and the same goes for its other tenses: , not . Hayn does not exist.

for something new, for something known

.

There's a book on the table.
Why?

a thing: it says it exists somewhere. says where a thing you already know about is. The word after it gives it away: goes with , , numbers and bare nouns, with , , and names. So , but .

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 · 5 min read

Practice

Practise this lesson

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 31 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 14 of 20 in this chapter

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