for context, he is not native english speaker as you could probably tell. do i just say outside is raining?
Am I the only the one who thought this was a horny call?
Seriously where on earth is your boyfriend from that he doesn’t know rain? That seems absurd, I’m sure even old school desert bedouins are familiar with the concept.
He probably knows what “raining” is. I think he is just confused by the phrase “It’s raining”. Or … He is just messing with her.
Most languages don’t need a dummy subject to do the raining. Whilst “it’s raining” may seem natural to people who grew up speaking English (or indeed several Germanic or romance la guages) it’s far from universal.
Wow you guys must have so much chemistry when you can’t even communicate
I think the hangup is why is there an “it” that’s doing the raining. My wife had trouble remembering that as well since we would either just say ‘rain’ or ‘rain falls’ in her language
“It” is the state of the outdoors
The sky is crying?
This is a “dummy pronoun” and I only know this because this popped up as a TIL earlier this week.
My introduction was Xkcd when they hired a mathematician for the weather forecast, then replaced him with a linguist [rollover: and then a software dev]
The rollover text should’ve ended with a link to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
It’s like snow but wetter
It is the weather, or the state of being outside.
Would it be easier to look up how to say it is raining in his native language? That is what I would do.
This is probably a lot heavier on the technical grammar than you need, but here is the relevant wikipedia page if you want it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun
Basically English (along with other Germanic languages and a whole bunch of others) doesn’t like having a verb by itself without something to do the verb, so we just put “it” in as a sort of placeholder. The “it” isn’t anything, but the grammar wants there to be something there
A good comment from back when Reddit was good:
It’s what’s called a dummy pronoun, a pronoun that carries no semantic information and is only used to fulfill a syntactic requirement. More generally that’s called a syntactic expletive, although that page says that there’s some argument about whether this particular use of a dummy pronoun falls under that category.
This is a common construction in languages that don’t allow dropping pronouns (non-“pro-drop” languages). German has “es regnet”, French (the only Romance language that isn’t pro-drop, IIRC) has “il pleut”, but in Italian it’s simply “piove”.
In English, in order to form a valid sentence, there needs to be at least one noun. While you can say “what’s the weather?” “raining,” as a reply, if there’s no implied subject, an empty noun must be established first. English would use “it” as a pure empty noun for the sake of the sentence.
Raining is the state of the weather outside. The “it” is implied to be the weather, because nothing else can really be raining.
I’d probably say that the state of the weather is ‘raining’.
Learning that there is no word for “it” was one of the biggest challenges for me when I first started learning Japanese.
In English, there is never an implied subject (grammatically speaking), unlike in many other languages.
I don’t know if this helps explain it to him, but it could help him to understand the concept. Verbs always need a subject, and if you contextually know what that subject is, you can use “it” (or he, her, etc) instead of being more specific.
“Raining” could be a full sentence in some languages, but in English, you need to specify that the weather is raining, but we can just say “it is raining”.
I’m a little surprised that your boyfriend didn’t learn this while he was learning the language. Did he self-learn? Going through a book on English grammar might be helpful for him.
Imperative commands and questions in English can have implied subjects.
- Sit down.
- Want to go out sometime?
Don’t tell me English has no implied subjects!
Technically doesn’t です・だ serve a similar purpose to “it is” in this case. I’m not a native speaker but does it sound a bit strange if someone were to just say 雨? You would usually say 雨だ right? While it’s not the same as “it”, in this usage, だ・です is closer to the meaning of “is” so it’s kinda similar?
That said, the absence of a concept of “it” in Japanese has never occurred to me so that was an interesting revelation. I am also a native Mandarin speaker which doesn’t really have an “it” either so maybe that’s why.
In this and other similar contexts, when “it” isn’t really referring to anything specific, you can kind of consider it to be “The General State of Existence”.
It’s raining.
It’s cold.
It is what it is.
Make the best of it.
It’s Thursday.
It’s Friday.
Friday.
Gotta get down on Friday.
Best answer here so far.
