This one's easy to ignore. Since the translation sounds similar in Spanish, ELLs tend to revert to the Spanish version. Shmoop hears you, ELLs. You can't hide.
English has a dummy subject: it. That means it doesn't have semantic meaning like a regular subject. Sound insane? Well, check out these examples:
- It's necessary that you study.
- It's important to re-read your essays.
- It's difficult to breathe underwater.
Trust us when we say that dummy it doesn't serve a grammatical function here. It's only there for syntactic reasons. We don't know why. All we know is that English really likes having stuff in subject position.
Compare dummy it to non-dummy it:
- It bit me!
- I finally found it after two days.
- We told her to look after it.
See the difference? In these sentences, it definitely refers to an object the way content words do.
In Spanish, dummy it doesn't exist. You say those structures like this:
- Es necesario que estudies.
- Es importante leer tus ensayos de nuevo.
- Es difícil respirar debajo del agua.
If you're thinking, "But Shmoop, in Spanish, you can drop the subject pronoun. Duh." Okay, fair enough, but putting a pronoun before the verb in those sentences would be weird and (dare we say it?) incorrect. So there.
Since you're an awesome ELL student, your two languages influence each other. Maybe you even have a third language, which makes you extra awesome, if you ask us.
So in English, you might say this:
- Is necessary that you study.
- Is important to double-check your essays.
- Is difficult to breathe underwater.
This is an easy fix. Just make sure you insert that T sound. Of course, you could be pronouncing it like is instead of it's for phonological reasons...but we won't get into that. If you thought it was is, it's actually it's. Make sense?
This is pretty easy to remember if you know that English only puts the main verb at the beginning of the sentence in commands, or imperative constructions. The sentences above are definitely not English-y. Keep that in mind.