それ　(sore) means "that" only in the context in which you are saying "that one" when you are indicating a specific object, however when you are using "that" to report speech, then there is no such translation for "that". Often, since Japanese and English are not at all related linguistically, you can not directly translate what you want to say from English to Japanese. Instead, you have to think of what kind of expression you want to use. In this case, you are trying to report the speech of another person. In your example: She tells me that I can cook. To do this in Japanese, you have to use the phrase ～と言う (~to iu). 言う means "to say." The complete pattern will be as follows: (subject) + は(wa) + (reported phrase) + と言う(to iu). 言う is the base form, but to make it polite and to put it in the past form, it will become 言いました (iimashita). So let's break your sentence into parts and translate them into Japanese. Subject = She = 彼女 (kanojo) Reported phrase = I can cook 私が料理を作ることが出来る (watashi ga ryouri wo tsukuru koto ga dekiru) So to write it out fully in Japanese, it will be: 彼女は私が料理を作ることが出来ると言いました。 Sorry for the long explanation and it might be more advanced for you, depending on what stage in your Japanese you are studying, but I wanted to give a full explanation to demonstrate how different English and Japanese look in this context. The Japanese language has a very complex, but beautiful structure and in time it will start to make more and more sense. There is a clear logic used when creating sentences in Japanese and when you learn one type of grammatical structure, it should be easy to figure out how to use it in different types of sentences. I wish you luck in your studies. If you have any more questions, please let me know.