I’ve returned to the new learning course and it’s going well. I have come across something that is confusing me though; the spanish for “I think you’ve done very well” is given as “pienso que usted lo ha hecho muy bien”. Leaving aside my feeling that “pienso que” is “I think that”, I don’t understand what the “lo” is doing there. I noticed it some other examples as well.
Thanks
Well, in English it is mostly okay to drop the conjunction “that”, but it still needs to be in the Spanish sentence. The “lo” is there for a similar reason, because in Spanish you literally say “I think that you have done it very well”.
Thanks Hendrik
Yes, it’s as Hendrik says. The Spanish think that you can’t just “do”, you have to “do something”, so they pop the lo in there to represent “it”.
This is causing my brain to go into a loop! I understand what you and Hendrik are saying and I fully accept that what you say is correct but, to me there is a difference between “having done very well” and “having done it very well”
I’ll just ignore my brain until I get over it 
The Spanish will want to know what have you done well? You can’t just ‘do’
Actually, to the Spanish “do” is an English word with very little meaning. They see it as something that you need to put in front to make a question, do you see that? but they don’t think of it as having much meaning on its own.
And this is another reason that I enjoy learning another language, not only do I have to learn to think in a different way, but it makes me look at my first language in a different way as well. Exciting stuff, well, to me tabeth!
I love that about language learning, and I was thinking more about ‘do’ earlier. It’s a weird word actually -
You can say “What were you doing last night?” but you can’t say “I was doing all evening” or “After dinner, I’ll do for a while”. There are circumstances in English where you have to specify something with the “doing” as well.
You can say “Well, it will have to do for now” though
And then you have the question of what ‘it’ is
I have been following this for two days, barely sleeping, and i still don’t know what “it” is lol
The exact same thought came to me as I pressed the reply button! This it & do thing is like following the rabbit down the hole, except instead of “Drink Me!” on the bottle it has “do drink” 