In case you didn't hear, English hates putting main verbs first in a sentence. It's just a tendency that syntacticians have noticed. In fact, to avoid having the main verb exposed at the beginning of the sentence, English takes semantically empty words and puts them at the front.
These lovely words are do, it, and there. (Okay, do is actually a little more special than that, but it's still meaningless...just don't tell it we said that.)
Now, you're probably thinking, "Semantically empty? Meaningless? What the Shmoop are you talking about, Shmoop?" Okay, fair enough. We'll explain it all in a bit, but what we mean is that there are two different versions of do, it, and there.
Yep, the words do, it, and there have secret homophones. Native English speakers don't need to be taught about these in school, so you've probably never learned about them.
Let's call these homophones dummies, because much like how wax and ventriloquist dummies look like people but are really not, the dummy words do, it, and there look like content words but are really more like function words.
This is why ELLs have trouble with these: their content word equivalents are more easy to learn because they can be translated.
Intrigued? If so, keep on clicking. If not, keep clicking anyway.