Tu préfères le chocolat ou la vanille ? - La vanille, c'est bon, mais le chocolat, c'est meilleur !

Jennifer C.C1Kwiziq Q&A regular contributor

Tu préfères le chocolat ou la vanille ? - La vanille, c'est bon, mais le chocolat, c'est meilleur !

First of all Happy Christmas to you all and many thanks for the hard work and patience the team puts into this question forum. My question is, in the above sentence, is the c'est as apposed to just est necessary, or is it just stylistic?
Asked 7 years ago
AurélieNative French expert teacher in KwiziqCorrect answer
Bonjour Jennifer, et Joyeux Noël à vous aussi !

In such cases, "Vanilla is nice..." stated as a general statement, you will use "c'est" instead of "est" in colloquial French.
If you said "La vanille est bonne", it would refer to a specific case = "*the* vanilla is good".
Because you use "la" i both cases, the way to show this is a general statement is to use "c'est".

I hope that's helpful!
Bonnes Fêtes et à bientôt !
Jennifer C.C1Kwiziq Q&A regular contributor
Thank you Aurélie. When you say you would use c'est in colloquial french, would formal french be different? Your answer certainly helped me in part because it is strange from an english point of view to have 'it is' in the middle of a sentence and now at least I understand why that can occur, but now you have raised the colloquial issue.
AurélieNative French expert teacher in Kwiziq
Here the term "colloquial" simply means that's the way French people would say it :) Bonnes fêtes !
Jennifer C.C1Kwiziq Q&A regular contributor
Merci bien et vous aussi!
Jennifer C. asked:

Tu préfères le chocolat ou la vanille ? - La vanille, c'est bon, mais le chocolat, c'est meilleur !

First of all Happy Christmas to you all and many thanks for the hard work and patience the team puts into this question forum. My question is, in the above sentence, is the c'est as apposed to just est necessary, or is it just stylistic?

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