Personal pronoun IT in Spanish

There is something important that has to be explained. The personal pronoun IT. Basically this is an English pronoun that refers to things or animals; In Spanish we do not have this pronoun. Probably you did not think about that before because we are in the first stages of our learning, but, if you look back at the personal pronouns, you will see that in third person, we did not have any reference to the English pronoun IT. Let’s remember them first: 

As you can see in the table above, there is not a personal pronoun IT. So, basically, all the subject personal pronouns in Spanish will be only used to refer to a person, not to a thing. Then? What do we do whenever we want to refer to a thing? You might wonder… First of all, the personal pronoun IT will be used in English when we know the thing that we are referring to; therefore, the specific thing and its name must be told previously; then is when we can start using the pronoun IT, not before that. 

In Spanish whenever we refer to a thing that is already known, you have 2 options: 

1. You tell back the name of the thing.
2. Or, as it is already known, we do not say any pronoun and we go straight to the verb. 

Let’s see clearly in an example:

¿CÓMO ES TU CLASE?

HOW IS YOUR CLASSROOM?

• LA CLASE ES BLANCA Y LA CLASE TIENE CUATRO MESAS      
• THE CLASS IS WHITE AND THE CLASS HAS FOUR TABLES

¿CÓMO ES TU CLASE?

HOW IS YOUR CLASSROOM?

•  X ES BLANCA Y X TIENE CUATRO MESAS      
• IT IS WHITE AND IT HAS FOUR TABLES

♣ Note:

1. X. We wrote down X, expressing an absence of the pronoun IT.

Important! In this first stages, it is not really important to know about it. It is just an introduction about the absence of the pronoun IT in Spanish. Eventually, in further steps, it will be important, but, it is a good thing to know from here on, because we are already describing things and of course the pronoun IT is an important part of it.