Yes. Yes, you can!
Learning a language with music sounds too good to be true, right? If you love music and you love Spanish, then the idea of combining the two and being able to practice sounds like a perfect marriage.
You may have tried and maybe you feel like it hasn’t actually helped. Maybe you play songs in Spanish while you clean or drive, or you keep it in the background and hope osmosis will do its thing.
This is good and all, but if you really want to learn Spanish through music, I have two words for you: active listening.
Active Listening vs. Passive Listening
When you decide to use music to practice Spanish (or the language of your choosing), you will want to actively listen. That is, you want to turn your full attention to the lyrics so you can identify known vocabulary and catch new words you can jot down and/or look up online.
Passive listening, on the other hand, is really not that useful for this goal. Attention is key when your goal is to learn and retain new information.
Choose your song(s) wisely.
We all have different music tastes. And, of course, you want to choose a song you enjoy. However, my recommendation is that, at least at the beginning, you choose a song that has some of some of following aspects:
- The singer enunciates clearly, that is their music diction is good.
- Contains common lexicon and it’s (for the most part) free of made-up words, anglicisms or too much slang.
- It is not too wordy or too repetitive.
It is not too fast or complex.
Need ideas? Here’s my top 10 recommended songs!
To make things easier for you, here is a top 10 of songs in Spanish that are perfect for students regardless of their level. And no, you will not find Despacito in this one!
- Julieta Venegas – Limón y Sal.
- La tortura – Shakira & Alejandro Sanz.
- Mi Dios y Mi Cruz – Donato & Estéfano
- Agua – Jarabe de Palo.
- Tabaco y Chanel – Bacilos
- Y aún así te vas – Belanova
- Historia del Taxi – Ricardo Arjona.
- Vivir Mi Vida – Marc Anthony
- Rosas – La Oreja de Van Gogh.
- La Bicicleta – Carlos Vives.
A song exercise (step-by-step)
I would like to show you the most effective way to learn Spanish through songs by following a step-by-step process. Got your song? Let’s get started.
Step #1: Get your hands on the lyrics.
Ideally I would recommend that you print the lyrics or that you create a file where you can copy and paste the lyrics. Most songs lyrics can be found online and are readily available to copy.
Whether you have a hard copy or an electronic copy, you will want to be able to highlight and bold new vocabulary; make side notes with definitions; underline sentences, and more. In other words, you want to be able to manipulate and work with the lyrics.
Step # 2: Look up all the new vocabulary
This might seem pretty obvious, but I know from experience that many of my students can be curious about words and yet they don’t take the time to look them up. I highly suggest you take the time to search the meaning of all the new words in your song and that you write it on your lyrics file. If you want to go a step further, write your own examples with the new vocab and you’re guaranteed to remember these words better!
Step # 3: Focus on the grammar:
Let’s use one of the songs from the list as an example. Let’s take Ricardo Arjona’s Historia del Taxi. This song is perfect to practice the past tenses. If this is something you would like to improve, here’s how you could work with the lyrics:
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Color-code different tenses:
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Here I have marked all the verbs in the past imperfect in red and the verbs in the simple past in blue.
Eran las diez de la noche, piloteaba mi nave
Era mi taxi un VolksWagen del año 68
Era un dia de esos malos donde no hubo pasaje
Las lentejuelas de un traje me hicieron la parada
Era una rubia preciosa
Llevaba minifalda
El escote en su espalda
Llegaba justo a la gloria
Una lágrima negra rodaba en su mejilla
Mientras que el retrovisor decía: “ve, qué pantorillas”
Yo vi un poco más, ah-ah-ah
Eran las diez con cuarenta, zigzagueaba en reforma
Me dijo: “me llamo Norma” mientras cruzaba la pierna
Sacó un cigarro algo extraño, de esos que te dan risa
Le ofrecí fuego de prisa y me temblaba la mano
Now, make a list of the verbs in the infinitive form:
Once you have identified each tense, write the infinitive form of all the verbs. For example:
eran – ser, piloteaba – pilotear, hubo – haber, hicieron – hacer, and so on.
Pay attention to the sentence structure:
Let’s take a sentence for the previous song:
Sacó un cigarro algo extraño
If you study this phrase, it could look like this:
Sacó – Verb in the third person she (Sacar – to take out)
Un cigarro (a cigarette) – direct object
Algo extraño (a bit strange) – adjective.
This sentence follows the common structure Subject – Verb – Object + Adjective.
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It is okay to translate:
There’s nothing wrong with translating. If you take the previous sentence, you could take the translation and write in the margins or notes: “She took out a cigarette a bit strange”.
If there’s anything too advanced or complicated in your song, feel free to skip it! You don’t need to understand or dissect every single sentence.
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Write your own sentence or examples:
Take the sentences you have underlined, translated and studied and now write your own examples using the same verb, same tense or same vocabulary.
This is where you take your practice a step further! This is where the magic happens!
So, whatever you do, do not skip this step.
Step # 4: Don’t forget to sing your song!
Singing your song is a crucial step. No one needs to hear you! But after all the studying you have done, you can now have fun and focus on pronunciation and memorization. Now it’s the time to play your song in the background and sing along wherever and whenever!
Make it a goal to listen to the song while reading the lyrics at least 3 times a week. Spotify has now released lyrics that can be displayed on your device screen as you listen to a song. This has made it incredibly convenient to learn and sing along with your favorite songs! Take advantage of it.
Pro tip: To focus on pronunciation, drill any words from your song that you are giving you a hard time. Pay close attention to the word in the song and try your best to imitate the sounds. Take advantage of Google translate which gives you the option to listen and practice your pronunciation.
And there you have it! The most efficient way to really learn Spanish and practice the language with music. The more you repeat this process, the easier it will get. You will also find what works best for you, so keep what serves you and leave the rest! And most importantly, have fun!
¡Qué viva la música!
Isabel Solano