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

Question

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?

Accepted 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 !

Answer

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.

Answer

Here the term "colloquial" simply means that's the way French people would say it :)

Bonnes fêtes !

Answer

Merci bien et vous aussi!