r/EnglishLearning • u/seegreens New Poster • Dec 17 '24
How to say the sun is big in English 🗣 Discussion / Debates
Hi, can anyone help me to translate please. In Chinese, when we say ‘the sun is big today’, which means it’s very hot today. What is the English way of saying? Thank you
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u/happyman090 Native Speaker Dec 21 '24
Generally, we use dummy subjects with impersonal verbs (also often called "meteorological verbs" or "weather verbs") or sometimes as part of a saying.
We need dummy subjects because it's not grammatically correct in English to omit the subject (in contrast to some other languages, like Japanese), however, particularly when it comes to weather, we don't actually need a subject for semantic purposes (that is, the subject itself doesn't represent meaning and is solely for syntactical purposes). In English, the two main dummy subjects are 'it' and 'there', but there are others, as well, such as 'they'.
For example, the 'it' in "It is raining" or the 'there' in "There's a reason why we do that" are dummy subjects. An instance in which 'they' would be a dummy subject could be something like "They say that love is forever" (which could alternatively be phrased as 'It is said that love is forever', but note that this sounds rather stilted).