Breakdown of Me encanta aplaudir cuando un actor o una actriz lo hace muy bien.
Questions & Answers about Me encanta aplaudir cuando un actor o una actriz lo hace muy bien.
In Spanish, encantar works like gustar, not like normal verbs such as hablar or comer.
- Me encanta literally means it delights me.
- The thing that delights (here, aplaudir) is the grammatical subject.
- Me is an indirect object pronoun meaning to me.
So:
- Me encanta aplaudir = Clapping delights me → I love clapping.
If you say yo encanto, it would mean I enchant (someone), which is not what you want here and is almost never used in this sense in everyday speech.
Me is an indirect object pronoun that answers to whom? or for whom?
- Me encanta aplaudir → Aplaudir (clapping) is what delights.
- Me tells you who is delighted: me (to me).
Compare:
- Me encanta aplaudir = I love clapping.
- Te encanta aplaudir = You love clapping.
- Le encanta aplaudir = He/She loves clapping.
So me is not a reflexive pronoun here; it is functioning like in me gusta, me interesa, me duele, etc.
The verb form agrees with the thing that you love, not with the person who loves.
In this sentence, the thing you love is aplaudir (an infinitive verb), which is grammatically singular, so you use encanta (3rd-person singular).
- Me encanta aplaudir.
- Me encanta cantar.
- Me encanta cantar y bailar. (Still encanta, because the grammatical subject is the whole activity, seen as one idea.)
You use encantan when the loved thing is a plural noun:
- Me encantan las películas. = I love movies.
- Me encantan los aplausos. = I love the applause (plural claps / rounds of applause).
After me encanta, Spanish normally uses:
- an infinitive verb to express liking an activity.
So:
- Me encanta aplaudir = I love clapping / I love to clap.
Using aplaudo (yo aplaudo) would change the meaning:
- Yo aplaudo cuando un actor o una actriz lo hace muy bien.
= I clap when an actor or actress does it very well.
(A simple statement of what I do, not what I love.)
With me encanta aplaudir, the focus is on enjoyment of the activity, not just the fact that you do it.
In this sentence, hace (indicative) is the natural choice, because you are talking about a general / habitual situation:
- Me encanta aplaudir cuando un actor o una actriz lo hace muy bien.
= Whenever an actor or actress does it very well, I love clapping.
Use indicative after cuando when:
- you describe habits or general truths,
- or you talk about specific past or present situations.
You would use the subjunctive (haga) after cuando if the main clause refers to a future or is giving an order / instruction, for example:
- Cuando un actor o una actriz lo haga muy bien, aplaude.
= When an actor or actress does it very well, clap.
(Referring to a future situation: it hasn’t happened yet.)
In your original sentence, we are describing what you generally love doing, so hace (indicative) is correct.
The speaker wants to include both possible genders: male (actor) and female (actriz).
Repeating the article is the most careful and standard way to do this:
- un actor o una actriz = an actor (male) or an actress (female).
You often repeat the article when:
- the nouns have different genders:
- un chico y una chica (a boy and a girl)
- un profesor o una profesora (a male or female teacher)
Omitting the second article (un actor o actriz) is sometimes heard, but repeating it sounds more natural and clearer, especially in careful or written Spanish.
The structure un actor o una actriz refers to one person at a time: either a man or a woman, but not both together in one specific case.
So grammatically it is singular:
- un actor o una actriz lo hace muy bien
= an actor or an actress does it very well.
Because at any given moment you’re thinking of one performer, you use hace (3rd-person singular), not hacen.
Lo is a direct object pronoun here. In this sentence it is neuter, referring not to a person but to:
- the action or performance of the actor/actress,
- roughly: what they do / the role / the job.
So:
- lo hace muy bien ≈ does it very well / does the job very well / performs it very well.
It does not mean him or her here. To mean does him or does her would be a different and usually strange idea.
In Spanish, the verb hacer is normally transitive: it needs something that is being done.
A common idiomatic pattern is:
- hacerlo bien / hacerlo mal = to do it well / badly.
The lo fills the role of a generic object (the thing that is done). Saying:
- un actor lo hace muy bien
is natural and idiomatic.
But:
- un actor hace muy bien
on its own sounds incomplete or odd, because hace is waiting for an object (what does he/she do well?).
You could avoid lo by changing the verb:
- cuando un actor o una actriz actúa muy bien
= when an actor or actress acts very well.
Bien is an adverb; bueno is an adjective.
- You use bien to modify how something is done (a verb):
- lo hace bien = (he/she) does it well.
- You use bueno/buena to modify a noun:
- un buen actor = a good actor.
- una buena actuación = a good performance.
In lo hace muy bien, bien modifies hace (the verb), so it must be an adverb, not an adjective:
- lo hace muy bien = he/she does it very well.
- lo hace muy bueno would be incorrect here.
In this sentence, aplaudir is used intransitively, just meaning to clap in general, without specifying whom you clap for:
- Me encanta aplaudir = I love clapping.
If you wanted to say I love clapping for the actors, you could add an object:
- Me encanta aplaudir a los actores.
With pronouns:
- Standard: Me encanta aplaudirlos. (clapping them / clapping for them)
- In much of Spain (due to leísmo de persona for males):
- Me encanta aplaudirle (for one male person).
In the original sentence, the focus is just on the action aplaudir itself, so no pronoun is needed or expected.