Let’s get some more use out of the clip Rencontre du deuxième type, which you first watched in entry #376. You’ll find the clip below so that you can listen again if you like.
At 2:10, the double says:
Ouais, c’est vrai… est pas pire.
This means “yeah, it’s true… she’s not bad.”
elle n’est pas pire
–> elle est pas pire
—-> est pas pire
The ne dropped, and elle est contracted to est. This is an informal usage. (If you needed to say this in a non-informal way, you could use: elle n’est pas mal.)
Go to 3:57 and listen to what the boyfriend says. Do you now understand why you didn’t hear the word elle after the word quand? (It happens twice.) There’s another informal contraction happening there.
I might suggest that you just learn to understand what happened in these examples. You don’t ever need to do this contraction when you speak yourself. Just make a mental note that sometimes elle might contract like this during informal conversations.
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