This is the 6th in a series of posts I’m doing where I help you learn Spanish from music videos and show you how I do it myself (that way you don’t have to wait for me to dissect a Spanish music video, you can go out and start doing it yourself with whatever songs you want and using it to teach yourself Spanish).  I’ve done five other similar posts prior to this: the last one on Juanes’ ‘Yerbatero’, the fourth one on Shakira’s ‘Te Aviso, Te Anuncio’, the third one on Shakira’s “Ojos Así”, the second one on Shakira’s “Suerte” and the first one on Shakira’s “La Tortura”.  If you’ve got any suggestions as far as artists or songs go please put them in the comments, I’d love to hear them.

About This Song

This song was originally released in English as part of Shakira’s She Wolf album (the Spanish version of which was called Loba) and was called Did It Again.  The theme is a common one in Shakira songs: a male vs. female battle where the male is the bad guy, though in this case Shakira is at least admitting that this is a weakness of hers and really her own fault.  The basic story line is that she has hooked up with this guy in a hotel room for a one-night stand, he’s married and hides the ring in his pocket, but she just can’t resist him and this is something she has this terrible habit of doing (she keeps “tripping on this same rock over and over”) so apparently this is one of many incidents like this, hence the title of the song in English, “Did It Again”.

Interestingly, according to Shakira, one of the main influences for this song were the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a 19th Century Dutch painter, as well as something from Morocco known as “jidba”, which I’ve had a hell of a time looking up–as best I can ascertain, it’s a sort of trance-like state that a dancer will be in while performing during a Moroccan ceremony known as “Lila”:

lila – A night ritual of Gnawa people of Morocco. The Lila is a rich ceremony that follows a path through the night whose road is marked in the sensory realms of sound (music, song), sight (colors), smells (incense) and movement (dance). This musical ritual enables participants to enter a trance state of healing purification in which they may perform startling and spectacular dances. Lila in Sanskrit is the Cosmic Play.

Source: Hamsa Lila

Ground Rules

1. I will post the video below this. The way I want you to do this is to play it once all the way through, then let’s look at it and analyze it one verse at a time.  Below the video will be the Spanish lyrics so that you can listen to the music video while following along with the lyrics–this is the intermediate step after you learn what the lyrics mean but before you can just listen to the song and understand everything without the lyrics to read.  Having the actual Spanish being spoken in front of you in written form so you can follow along with the audio allows you to attune your listening comprehension, it’s that intermediate step that gets you to the point where you can understand everything being said without the lyrics to read, they’re sort of like training wheels (thanks to Eiteacher for this suggestion).

2. Under the lyrics will be my translation and analysis of what was said, here is where you’ll actually learn the Spanish that was spoken during the song.  I will post the Spanish lyrics and then the English translation of them.  Use the English lyrics and SpanishDict (I highly recommend you have this open in another tab while you’re doing this) to determine the definition of any words you don’t know (I will cover a lot of the words used, but not all of them)–if the regular definition of a particular word isn’t being used or the word is being used in such a way that simply knowing its definition won’t help you, I will explain it.

3. Next I will pick out various aspects of the Spanish that she’s using that I think require an explanation–I will not cover simple things like the definition of words like “el” (which means “the”), “ser” (which means “to be”), etc. unless there is something about the way they’re being used that I think warrants explanation.  If you don’t understand what a word means, like I said, just check the English translation and/or SpanishDict.  I will link to a lot of external sites with explanations for the grammar used, or the conjugation of a verb used, or the definition of a word–I’m doing this because I don’t have the space here to explain every single detail of what’s going on, there’s an enormous amount of Spanish being used in a single song like this which is precisely why I advocate this method (this is essentially The Telenovela Method, FYI), because you can learn so much from a single song or movie or book, etc.  If you don’t understand a grammatical term that I use and it’s a link, click it!

4. Now, go back and play the verse we just analyzed several times and see if you can hear and understand everything being said, then go on to the next one.

5. If you are confused about anything and feel there’s something I didn’t cover or explain but should have, please let me know in the comments.  As a matter of fact, please leave a comment and let me know what you think regardless, I need feedback and love getting it, each individual comment allows me to make an improvement or fix a problem thereby making this blog just a little bit better each and every time I get feedback of some sort.  Oh, and you can also contact me via my contact form (this will go to my e-mail inbox).

The Video

The Lyrics

En la suite dieciséis
Lo que empieza no termina
Del mini bar al Edén
Y en muy mala compañía

Era ese sabor en tu piel
A azufre revuelto con miel
Así que me llené de coraje y me fui a caminar por el lado salvaje

Pensé “no me mires así”
Ya sé lo que quieres de mi
Que no hay que ser vidente aquí
Para un mal como tú no hay cuerpo que aguante

Lo hecho está hecho
Volví a tropezar
Con la misma piedra que hubo siempre
Se siente tan bien todo lo que hace mal
Y contigo nunca es suficiente

Cómo fue
Qué pasó
Esa noche
Impaciente

Fueron a llamar
La de recepción
Cuando se quejaba
La de diecisiete

No puede ser nada normal
Acabar eligiendo tan mal
En materia de hombres soy toda una experta siempre en repetir mis errores
No hay ceguera peor

Que no querer mirar
Cuando te guardabas el anillo dentro del bolsillo y dejarlo pasar

Lo hecho está hecho
Volví a tropezar
Con la misma piedra que hubo siempre
Se siente tan bien todo lo que hace mal
Y contigo nunca es suficiente

Nunca me sentí tan fuera de lugar
Nunca tanto se escapó de mi control
Pero todo en este mundo es temporal
Lo eres tú y lo soy yo

Nunca me sentí tan fuera de lugar
Nunca tanto se escapó de mi control
Pero todo en este mundo es temporal
En eso no decido yo

Lo hecho está hecho
Volví a tropezar
Con la misma piedra que hubo siempre
Se siente tan bien todo lo que hace mal
Y contigo nunca es suficiente

Se siente tan bien todo lo que hace mal

Translation and Analysis

First Verse:

En la suite dieciséis
Lo que empieza no termina
Del mini bar al Edén
Y en muy mala compañía

Translation:

In suite sixteen
That which starts doesn’t end
From the mini-bar to Eden
And in very bad company

Alright first of all let’s look at what words we don’t know here, you can probably guess the obvious such as “suite” meaning “suite” as in a hotel suite, “lo” can mean “he/she” or “it” but in conjunction with “que” as in “lo que” you get a very common expression that best translates to “that which”.  “Empezar” is an irregular verb in Spanish that means “to begin”, irregular means that the conjugation isn’t the standard -ar verb conjugation, the change comes at the end and you will see this same change with all such verbs ending in “-ezar”, the only thing different you do is add an “i” before the second “e” for all forms in the present and present subjunctive except nosotros and vosotros as well as change the “z” to a “c” in the present subjunctive, as such (credit: SpanishDict’s fantastic conjugation tool):

A piece of advice: don’t try to memorize this directly, instead memorize and learn how to use it at the same time by actually using it, I personally recommend a website called Lang-8 where you can write anything you want and have it reviewed and corrected by a native speaker for free.  Take any new Spanish you’ve just learned and use it to write up a couple paragraphs or a sentence or two or whatever on there, actually use it, that’ll make you remember it better than nearly any memorization technique.

Alright, moving on, “terminar” simply means “to end” but you’ve already guessed that, so the line “lo que empieza no termina” means “that which begins doesn’t end”.  In the line “Del mini bar al Edén” you get the two most common contractions in Spanish together in the same sentence, how lovely: “al” (which is “a” + “el”) and “del” (which is “de” + “el”), so “Del mini bar al Edén” means “From the mini bar to the Eden” (we would normally leave out the “the” in reference to a place name like “Eden”, Spanish does not).  For what it’s worth I highly suspect she’s talking about sex, which apparently began at the mini-bar.

Next line: “Y en muy mala compañía”.  Very simple, “Y” means “and”, “en” means “in”, and “compañia” means “company” in terms of the people around you and “mal” means “bad”, which in this case has been modified to “mala”, making it feminine in order to match the gender of the noun, “la compañia”.

Next verse:

Era ese sabor en tu piel
A azufre revuelto con miel
Así que me llené de coraje y me fui a caminar por el lado salvaje

Which means:

It was that taste of your skin
Like sulfur mixed with honey
So that I was filled with courage and went to walk on the wild side

Ok, first line: “Era ese sabor en tu piel”.  Now “era” is the 3rd person singular imperfect form of “ser” (“to be”).  “Ese” means “that”, in reference to “sabor” which is a masculine noun (but we knew that since it was “ese” instead of “esa”) that means “taste”.

Now we get to something really interesting that I haven’t seen before (and just had to ask the awesome folks over at the WordReference forums about): the use of “A” to mean “like” in the line “A azufre revuelto con miel” which translates to “Like sulfur mixed with honey”.  “A” almost always means “at” or “to” or some very similar variation of those two (occasionally they’ll use it where we would use “in”), but occasionally it’s used to mean “like” and in particular you will very frequently see it paired up with the noun “sabor” as we do here, in fact if you go and look up the definition of “sabor” on SpanishDict (please click) you’ll note that the second example sentence they use for the primary definition of “sabor” (which is “taste”) is:

con sabor a limón = lemon-flavored

Another common use of “a” to mean “like” is with “parecer” (“to look like”), e.g. “Te pareces a tu papá – you look like your father.”

Moving on, “azufre” simply means “sulfur” and “miel” means “honey” (quick trivia, the United States is known, sometimes seriously and sometimes in jest, in Colombia as “the land of milk and honey” or “la tierra de leche y miel”, meaning that the U.S. is paradise and everything is wonderful there).  Now, the verb “revolver“, which normally means “to turn around” can also mean “to mix or stir”, so the past participle could, of course, mean “mixed” or “stirred”, right? Right.  And in this case it (“revuelto”) does, so we finally get “like sulfur mixed with honey” out of “A azufre revuelto con miel”.  Savvy? 😉

Next line: “Así que me llené de coraje y me fui a caminar por el lado salvaje”.  “Así” just means “this way” or “like this” or “so that” (which is how it’s used here, this is probably the most common way that “así” is used).  Next we get to the verb “llenar” which means “to fill”, and in this case she’s being filled with courage, “coraje”, so that she can take a walk on the wild side: “me fui a caminar [to walk] por[on] el lado [side] salvaje [wild]”.  “Fui” is just the preterite of “ir”: when “ir” is pronomial (aka “reflexive”) it means “to leave” or “to go” in reference to a person, so when she says “me fui” she’s saying “I went”.  So, the full translation is:

“Así que me llené de coraje y me fui a caminar por el lado salvaje” = “So that I was filled with courage and went to walk on the wild side”

Got it?

Next verse:

Pensé “no me mires así”
Ya sé lo que quieres de mi
Que no hay que ser vidente aquí
Para un mal como tú no hay cuerpo que aguante

Which means:

I thought “don’t look at me like that”
I already know what you want from me
One doesn’t have to be a clairvoyant here
For an illness like you there isn’t a body that will tolerate it

Ok, first line: Pensé “no me mires así”. “Pensé” is just the preterit form of pensar (“to think”), and “no me mires así” is a command, therefore “mires” is the negative informal imperative form of “mirar” which means “to look at or watch”. Now, something funny is going on here if you’re really paying close attention: “mirar” is an -ar verb and therefore the informal (tu form) imperative should end in “a”, right? It should be “mira”, it should end in “a” and that “s” certainly shouldn’t be there right?  Normally yes, but when an imperative in the familiar second person form (that is, either tú or vosotros) is negative things change: you actually switch the “e” to an “a”  and add an “s” for -er/-ir verbs and the “a” to an “e” and add an “s” for -ar verbs (confusing, I know, I still slip up on this one).  Ok, here are some examples to help you understand how this works:

¡Mira lo que ha hecho! = Look what you’ve done!

In this case “mirar” is put into the imperative tú form simply by taking the “r” off the end, it’s just like the regular present tú form except there’s no “s” on the end (“miras”).  This is how it’s done for the affirmative imperative (affirmative simply means “not negative”, that is we’re not saying “don’t look”).  The negative imperative in the familiar (tú) form is a bit different:

¡No mires allí! = Don’t look there!

In this case, it’s imperative, it’s in the tú form, and it’s negative: this means that it’s going to change, it’s not going to be “no mira allí”, we’re going to change the “a” to “e” and add an “s”, so we get “no mires allí”.  Why do they do this? I have no idea and I doubt anyone else really knows either, a lot of grammar rules don’t really have much rhyme or reason to them, they just are the way they are because that’s how the language evolved over time and no one ever designed it a certain way for a certain reason.

Sorry, if you’re not familiar with this it’s horribly confusing, I came to fully understand this stuff only after running into it several times and relearning it each time.  I highly recommend you read two additional articles that give this subject much more detailed treatment than I can here: Informal Commands on StudySpanish.com and Positive and Negative Commands in Spanish on About.com.

“Así”, as we’ve discussed already, means “this/that way” or “like this/that”.

Next line: Ya sé lo que quieres de mi.  “Ya” means “already”, “sé” is just the present “yo” form of “saber“, which means “to know”, so “sé” means “I know”, “lo que” means “that which”, “quieres” is just the present “tú” form of “querer” which means “to want”, and “de mi” simply means “from me”, so we get the literal translation of “Already I know that which you want from me”, which is better translated as:

“Ya sé lo que quieres de mi” = “I already know what you want from me”

Easy.  Next line: Que no hay que ser vidente aquí. “Que” just means “that” in the sense of “such that”, as in “I already know what you want from me [ya sé lo que quieres de me] such that you don’t have to be psychic to see it [que no hay que ser vidente aquí].”, got it?  “Hay que” is just a common expression that means “one must do something”, in this case “one must not be a psychic” in the form of “no hay que ser vidante”.  “Vidente” literally means “one who sees” but is simply a common term for “clarivoyant” or a “psychic”.  So we get:

“Que no hay que ser vidente aquí” = “One doesn’t have to be a clairvoyant here”

Next line: Para un mal como tú no hay cuerpo que aguante.  “Para” just means “for”, “un mal” could mean a few things here: “mal” as a noun as it’s used here could mean “evil”, “harm or damage”, “illness”, or simply “bad thing”.  But considering the fact that it’s referring to something that a body cannot stand, I’m definitely going to go with “illness”, make sense?  So by saying “para un mal como tú” she’s saying “for an illness like you”.  Next, “no hay” just means “there isn’t” in a general sense: “hay” is a word you’re going to see a lot, it’s technically the 3rd person present conjugation of “haber”, which means “to have”, but “hay” almost never means “have”, it’s a general expression that means “there is” or “there are”–check out the definition of “haber” and scroll down to where it says “verb impersonal” and you’ll see it.  So “no hay cuerpo” means “there isn’t a body”, ok?  Now, the last bit, “que aguante”, is pretty simple: “aguantar” means “to bear, stand, or tolerate” and it’s in the subjunctive because it’s something that’s hypothetical and therefore not certain and so “aguante” sort of means something like “would be able to stand [if this were to happen]”–for more information about the subjunctive check out my post called The Spanish Subjunctive Explained.  If you read that article, “aguante” in this case would fall under the “Doubt/Denial” section of W.E.I.R.D.O.  Alright, so here’s what we got:

“Para un mal como tú no hay cuerpo que aguante” = “For an illness like you there isn’t a body that will tolerate it”

Next verse:

Lo hecho está hecho
Volví a tropezar
Con la misma piedra que hubo siempre
Se siente tan bien todo lo que hace mal
Y contigo nunca es suficiente

Which means:

What’s done is done
I tripped up again
On the same stone that’s always been there
Everything bad that happens, feels so good
and with you it’s never enough

Ok, first line: Lo hecho está hecho.  Here, “lo” is being used to mean “that which”, as in “that which is done” (“hecho” is the past participle of “hacer”, which means “to do”, so “hecho” means “done”).  If you’ll check out the definition of “lo” and look under “article (neutro)” you’ll see what I mean, “lo antigua” means “that which is antique”, “lo mejor” means “that which is the best”, etc.  This is one of those words that can mean a million different things depending on how you use it and you just have to see it used a bunch of different times and get used to it before you will understand it.  So “lo hecho está hecho” literally means something like “that which is done is done”, or a better translation would be: “what’s done is done”.

Next line: Volví a tropezar.  Ah.  This one’s screwy.  Well, what’s screwy is the way that “volver” is used in this instance, and you’ll see this elsewhere as well: “volver + X” can frequently mean “I/you/they did X again” because “volver” means “to return” when referring to a person (look at the definition under “instransitive verb”) so they’re saying that they ‘returned’ to doing X, meaning that they did it again.  Oh, and “tropezar” means “to trip or stumble”.  So “volví a tropezar” literally translates to “I came back to tripping”, so what it really means is:

“Volví a tropezar” = “I tripped again”

Next line: Con la misma piedra que hubo siempre.  Not much going on here, “Con la misma” means “with [con] the [la] same [misma]”, “piedra” means “stone” and “hubo” is just the preterit form of “haber”, which as we’ve discussed is most commonly used to mean “there is/are”, so if it’s in the preterit then that means that “hubo” means…what? “There was/were”, right? Yup! You got it.  And “siempre” means “always”, so literally it means “With the same stone that was always”, or properly translated:

“Con la misma piedra que hubo siempre” = ” On the same stone that’s always been there”

Next line: Se siente tan bien todo lo que hace mal.  Ok, here we’re seeing the use of something called the impersonal se: this is used to express a general statement, e.g. “one feels X” or “one does X” or “it feels X”, etc.  It’s sort of like what we call “the royal ‘you'” in English, e.g. if someone says “If you break the law, you might go to jail.” they’re not necessarily talking to anyone in particular but in general, another less common way of saying precisely the same thing would be “If one breaks the law, one might go to jail”–it’s sort of a general non-specific statement, it’s not addressing anyone in particular.  That’s how “se” is being used here, in this case “se siente” means “it feels”, not necessarily “I feel” or “I felt” or that anyone in particular “felt” something, but just that if one is in that particular situation then one “feels” a certain way.  Here are a few examples in English and Spanish:

“Taking a shower feels good” = “Ducharse se siente bien”

“Chocolate tastes good” = “El chocolate se sabe bien.”

These are general statements and we make them by using “se” + 3rd person present form of the verb (the present ‘usted’ or ‘ustedes’ form).

Moving on: “Se siente tan bien…”: “tan” is a word that means “so”, essentially, in the sense that it emphasizes quantity, e.g. “so much” or “so many”, e.g. “I had so many chocolates I felt sick”, in this case “tan” + “bien” = “so good”, so we get: “se siente tan bien” = “it feels so good”, right? Right.

The rest is pretty straightforward: “todo lo que hace mal” = “everything [todo] that [lo] which [que] does [hace] bad [mal]”.  Ok, we’ve covered the “lo que” thing before, “hace” is just the present singular form of hacer, nothing fancy there, and “mal” means bad.  I think what I need to explain here is the overall meaning: she’s basically saying that everything that does bad stuff feels good, that is all things which do bad feel good, got it?  The way we would say this in English is just slightly different but important to point out because otherwise this might confuse some people: we would say bad things feel good, the slight difference being that “bad” is describing the thing in English and in Spanish “mal” is describing the actions of those things.  So in Spanish the actions are bad, in English the thing is bad–is there any difference in what’s being said? No, if the things something does are bad then it’s bad, if a thing is bad then it’s going to do bad things.  I just wanted to point out this minor difference in semantics to prevent confusion (because it initially confused me, haha).

Last line, and it’s simple: Y contigo nunca es suficiente.  “Contigo” is a contraction of “con” (which means “with”) and “ti” which means “you”, when it’s contracted the “go” is added to the end (probably to make it easier to pronounce, I don’t really know) and you get “contigo” which means “with you”.  “Nunca” means “never”, “es” is the 3rd person present form of “ser“, and “suficiente” means “sufficient” or “enough”.  Simple.  So we get:

“Y contigo nunca es suficiente” = “and with you it’s never enough”

Next verse:

Cómo fue
Qué pasó
Esa noche
Impaciente

Which translates to:

How it was
What happened
That night
Impatient

Oh good, a short and easy one: do I really need to explain much here? I think we might be able to knock this whole verse out in one paragraph.  “Fue” is just the preterite of “ser“, so “fue” means “was”, and of course “cómo” means “how”.  “Qué” means “what” and “pasó” is just the preterite of “pasar” which primarily means “to pass” but that can be “to pass” in the sense of “to occur” or “to happen” (check the definition, scroll down, it’s there), “Qué pasó” means “what happened”.  In fact, a very common greeting is “¿Qué pasa?” which means “what’s happening?”, and the way you would ask somebody “What happened?” would be…guess…”¿Qué pasó?”.  “Esa” means “that”, “noche” means “night”, and “impaciente” means “impatient”.  That’s it.

Next verse:

Fueron a llamar
La de recepción
Cuando se quejaba
La de diecisiete

Which translates to:

They went to call
The girl from reception
When she was complaining
The girl in room 17

“Fueron” is just the 3rd person plural preterite of “ir“, so it means “they went”, and “llamar” means “to call”, so we get “Fueron a llamar” = “They went to call”.

“La de recepción” means “The girl from reception”, in other words the receptionist, who is apparently female.  Now how does “la” mean “the girl”? Simple, “la” is a direct object pronoun and like other direct object pronouns (such as “lo”) it can mean a person or a thing, in this case since it’s feminine (the masculine equivalent is “lo”), it must be referring to either a female person or a thing which is feminine (that is, the word for that thing is feminine, e.g. “la casa”), and in this case we can determine from the context that it’s a person because whatever it/she is, it/she is at the reception desk and they’re going to call it/her, so that kind of narrows it down, doesn’t it?  And of course “de” means “from” and “recepción” means “reception”, so “la de recepción” means literally “her from reception”, which better translates to “the girl from reception”.

Cuando se quejaba. “Cuando” means “when”, simple, and then it gets a bit more complicated…ok, first of all we run into “se” again, but in this case it’s not being used the way it was before as the impersonal “se”, it’s reflexive, which means that “se” represents a specific person, the one doing the action (complaining, in this case, as that what “quejar” means), and it shows that they’re doing the action to themselves.  Complaining to themselves? Errmm, yes, no, not literally.  Remember I said grammar didn’t have to make sense, that it was kind of arbitrarily determined and a lot of it doesn’t have a good reason for being done the way it is? Right.  Well, a lot of verbs in Spanish are almost always reflexive, especially when a person is doing them, simply because they are.  “Quejarse“, which means “to complain”, is one of them (notice how the word is “quejarse”, not “quejar”, there isn’t even a “quejar” listed in the dictionary: go ahead and try to look it up, see what happens).  The way I would say “I’m complaining” would be “Me quejo”, the way I would say “I’m going to complain” would be “Voy a quejarme”, see how it’s reflexive each time no matter what?

“But that doesn’t make sense.”  No, it doesn’t, but that’s still the way you do it.  Haha, isn’t this fun? 😀

“But is there some way of determining whether a verb should be reflexive, like a pattern or rule like ‘i before e except after c’  or something?” No.

“So I just have to memorize them individually and remember whether or not each verb is reflexive before I use it?” Yes.

“Well that sucks.” Yes, it does.

Moving on…La de diecisiete.  Same thing as above with “la”, it represents a girl.  Apparently it was a girl in room 17, the one right next to theirs (remember at the beginning of the song, the very first line, where they told you they were in room 16?) who called down to reception to complain (I think Shakira’s implying that maybe she was jealous of all the fun Shakira and her lover were having next door…or maybe the noise was just keeping her up).

How did I determine this? Context: “When they complained, la de diecisiete” so whatever or whoever was complaining is expressed here by “la”, and things don’t complain, people do, so it was a person that complained and they were female because it’s “la” instead of “lo”.  This, by the way, is also why the preceding line, “Cuando se quejaba”, was translated as “When she complained” instead of “When they complained” 😉

Oh, and diecisiete, of course, means seventeen.

Next verse:

No puede ser nada normal
Acabar eligiendo tan mal
En materia de hombres soy toda una experta siempre en repetir mis errores
No hay ceguera peor

Which means:

It can’t be anything normal
To end up choosing so badly
In the matter of men I am always a complete expert in repeating my mistakes
There isn’t a worse blindness

No puede ser nada normal is easy, “puede” is the present form of “poder” which means “to be able to”, “ser” means “to be”, “nada” means nothing, and “normal” means “normal”.  Done. Next.

Acabar eligiendo tan mal.  “Acabar” means “to end or finish”, “eligiendo” is just the gerund of “elegir” which means “to choose”, we’ve already covered “tan”, and “mal” means “bad”.  The way “acabar” is being used threw me for just a second initially, but it became apparent that this is simply how they say “to end up”, they just use the infinitive of “acabar”, so she’s literally saying “to end choosing so badly” or “to finish choosing so badly”, but what she means is “to end up choosing so badly”.

En materia de hombres soy toda una experta siempre en repetir mis errores.  Agh, long sentence!  But not particularly complicated or tricky. “Materia” simply means “matter”, as in “the matter at hand”, “hombre” means “man” so “en materia de hombres” means “in the matter of men”.  “Soy” is the first person present form of “ser“, so “soy” means “I am”, “toda” in this case means “completely” (check the definition, scroll down, it’s one of the secondary definitions and the one that makes the most sense here: context, context, context), “experta” means, you guessed it, “expert”, and “siempre” means “always”–so now we’ve got “soy toda una experta siempre”, which means “I am completely an expert always” or, a little bit better translation could be done by switching the word order to make it a bit more English-friendly by saying: “I’m always a complete expert”.  Lastly, we have “en repetir mis errores”: “repetir” means “to repeat”, “mis” is the plural “my”, and “error” means…yeah, “error”.  Told you it wasn’t complicated.  Let’s put it all together:

“En materia de hombres soy toda una experta siempre en repetir mis errores” = “In the matter of men I am always a complete expert in repeating my mistakes”

Last line: No hay ceguera peor.  Again, we run into “hay“: I told you this was common.  So “no hay” means…right, “there isn’t” or “there aren’t”, depending on the context, and in this case it’s “there isn’t” because the object, “ceguera” is singular, not plural.  “Ceguera” means blindness, and “peor” means worse, so we literally get “there isn’t blindness worse”, or better translated: “There is no worse blindness”.

Next verse:

Que no querer mirar
Cuando te guardabas el anillo dentro del bolsillo y dejarlo pasar

Which means:

To not want to look
When you kept the ring inside your pocket and letting it happen

Que no querer mirar.  This is a bit confusing, I know, “que” would just mean “that” as it normally would, but we have the infinitive of “querer” (which means “to want”), so in this case “que” coupled with an infinitive like that means something more like “to not [infinitive]”, in this case “to not want”.  “Mirar” means “to look”, so she’s saying “to not want to look” in reference to herself, that is she didn’t want to look.  Ok, I’ll give an example in English: let’s say I’m talking about the one time I passed up the opportunity to eat cheese, and hypothetically let’s say I love cheese and would never do that, but I did it once, so I shake my head and say “To pass up the opportunity to eat cheese like that…I just…I don’t know what was wrong with me”–see how I used “to pass up” like that?  I didn’t say “I passed up”, I said to pass up, I used the infinitive in English by adding “to” to the verb “pass”, but I was still talking about myself.  So when she says “to not want to look” she’s talking about how she didn’t want to look, got it?

I’ll give some examples in Spanish:

“Que simplemente salir cómo eso…no es bien.” = “To simply leave like that…it isn’t right.”

“Que no ayudar a ella…creo que eso estaba mal.” = “To not help her…I think that was wrong.”

Next line: Cuando te guardabas el anillo dentro del bolsillo y dejarlo pasar.  “Cuando” means “when”, “guardar” means “to keep” and it’s in the imperfect informal form here because she’s speaking to her lover, so of course she uses “tú” with him because their relationship is familiar and informal.  “Anillo” means “ring”, “dentro” means “inside” or “in”, “bolsillo” means “pocket”, “dejar” means “to let”, and “pasar“, as we’ve already noted, means “to happen”.  The “lo” attached to the end of “dejar” simply means “it” in reference to his action of putting the ring in his pocket, so “dejarlo pasar” means “to let it happen” or “letting it happen”.  So, putting it together we literally get something like: “When you were keeping the ring inside of the pocket and to let it happen” which might sound strange, especially with the bit at the end, but it has to be take in context with the previous line (the two lines together are really one whole sentence, not two separate ones):

“Que no querer mirar cuando te guardabas el anillo dentro del bolsillo y dejarlo pasar” = “To not want to see when you were keeping the ring inside of the pocket and to let it happen.”  This is still a literal translation but does it make a bit more sense?  Let’s translate it properly into English:

“Que no querer mirar cuando te guardabas el anillo dentro del bolsillo y dejarlo pasar” = “To not want to look
when you kept the ring inside your pocket and to let it happen”

And, of course, she’s talking about herself here, she’s criticizing herself for ignoring the fact that he’s married and has a ring in his pocket and then letting it happen.

Next verse:

Lo hecho está hecho
Volví a tropezar
Con la misma piedra que hubo siempre
Se siente tan bien todo lo que hace mal
Y contigo nunca es suficiente

This is just the chorus repeating a verse we’ve already covered.  Next.

Nunca me sentí tan fuera de lugar
Nunca tanto se escapó de mi control
Pero todo en este mundo es temporal
Lo eres tú y lo soy yo

Which means:

I’ve never felt so out of place
Never has so much escaped my control
But everything in this world is temporary
You are and so am I

Nunca me sentí tan fuera de lugar.  “Nunca” means “never”, and “me sentí” is the first person preterit of “sentir“, which means “to feel”, which is another one of those almost-always-reflextive verbs, and when you’re using it to describe how a person feels or felt you will always make it reflexive as we see here.  “Tan” we’ve already covered, that means “so” as in “very”, so “tan fuera de lugar” means “so out of place”.  “Fuera” normally means “outside” or “away” and coupled with “lugar“, which means “place”, we get the phrase “fuera de lugar” which literally and contextually translates to “out of place”.  So we get:

“Nunca me sentí tan fuera de lugar” = “I’ve never felt so out of place”

Next: Nunca tanto se escapó de mi control.  “Tanto” is very similar to “tan” and just means “so much”, “escapó” is the singular 3rd person preterit of “escapar” means “to escape” and it’s reflexive because the things that escaped her did the escaping, not her, she’s not saying she escaped, she’s saying that things escaped themselves from her (note my use of the word “themselves” there, that indicates that it’s reflexive: verbs that are reflexive do the action they do to the subject, right? right).  The subject that escaped is “the things”, so the subject is doing the action (escaping) to itself, hence the use of the reflexive.  A great way to explain this is to look at precisely how we might say this in English: “Things escaped me.”: now, who’s doing the escaping, who’s the subject? The things are, you are the object.

Anyway, the rest is pretty self-explanatory: de mi control.  “Control” means…”control”, right.  So “de mi control” means “from my control”.  Let’s put it all together:

“Nunca tanto se escapó de mi control” = “Never has so much escaped my control”

Next line: Pero todo en este mundo es temporal.  Easy. Most of this we’ve already covered, “todo” means “everything”, “este” means “this”, “mundo” means “world”, and “termporal” means “temporary”.  Done.  What does it mean?

“Pero todo en este mundo es temporal” = ” But everything in this world is temporary”

Next: Lo eres tú y lo soy yo.  “Lo” means “it” in reference to “temporary” in the previous line, so she’s saying that both him and her are temporary (“hey, we’re gonna die some day so let’s get it on!”).  “Eres” is the present familiar form of “ser“, and “soy” is the present 1st person form of “ser”, so “eres” means “you are”, and “soy” means I am.  Literally the sentence, “lo eres tú y lo soy yo” means something like “it you are and it am I”, or correctly translated:

“Lo eres tú y lo soy yo” = “You are and so am I”

Next verse:

Nunca me sentí tan fuera de lugar
Nunca tanto se escapó de mi control
Pero todo en este mundo es temporal
En eso no decido yo

This is just the same verse repeated again except with a different line at the end: En eso no decido yo. “Eso” means “that” in reference to the previous line where she said they’re both temporary, “decido” is the present 1st person form of “decidir” so “decido” means “I decide”, so literally the line En eso no decido yo means something like “In that no decide I”, or more correctly:

“En eso no decido yo ” = “In that I do not decide”

Got it?

Next verse:

Lo hecho está hecho
Volví a tropezar
Con la misma piedra que hubo siempre
Se siente tan bien todo lo que hace mal
Y contigo nunca es suficiente

That’s just the chorus repeating a verse. Next.

Se siente tan bien todo lo que hace mal

And we’ve already covered that.  We’re done!

Mother of god that was a long post.  Major kudos to you if you made it through all of this in one sitting, because I sure as hell didn’t write it all in one sitting, I assure you that.  Please, leave a comment and tell me what you think: any and all corrections and suggestions are more than welcome!  Also…  If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below!  Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

This is the next installment in the whole “let’s learn Spanish from music videos” thing I’m doing that everyone seems to like (which I totally agree with, using popular media like this that you enjoy is a fantastic way to learn the language, plus it uses contemporary Spanish).  Up until now it’s been all Shakira, all the time, so I thought it was time to switch it up a bit and several people have suggested Juanes–I listened to a few of his songs and this one was easily the one I liked the most, it’s quite a bit more upbeat than most of the others it seems (everything else he does seems to be kind of depressing and sad, honestly) plus it’s one of his most popular songs ever and it’s really recent (2010) so everyone ought to be familiar with it, so I really felt it was easily the best choice.

What’s a ‘Juanes’?

It’s a contraction of his first and middle names: “Juan” + “Esteban” = “Juanes”, kind of like “Brangelina” or “Bennifer” 😀

Juanes is one of the biggest names in the Spanish-language music world, probably second only to Shakira.  He’s now a solo artist, though he started out in a band called Ekhymosis that he started in 1988 and later disbanded 10 years later in 1998.  He’s sold more than 12 million albums and won 17 Latin Grammys, more than any other artist.

An interesting fact about Juanes is his refusal to (almost) never sing in English or really any language other than Spanish, his explanation being that “Singing in Spanish is very important because it’s the language in which I think and feel. I respect people that sing in English, but for now I’ll keep my Spanish.”

Yerbatero

Yerbatero is a guitar-driven rock song that significantly deviates from Juanes’ previous romantic latin-pop songs which had previously dominated his discography, and it seems to have been quite a success with it being his most popular music video on YouTube, beating even La Camisa Negra and debuting on the Latin Pop Charts at number four.

The word itself is an Andean slang term that means “herbalist” or, more accurately in this context, “healer” and comes from the word “yerba mate” which is a type of tea popular in Latin America and especially Argentina, and a “yerbatero” was originally a seller of yerba mate tea.  This will make a great deal of sense once you start reading the lyrics below and see how Juanes is referring to himself as a sort of healer of broken hearts.

Ground Rules

1. I will post the video below this. The way I want you to do this is to play it once all the way through, then let’s look at it and analyze it one verse at a time.  Below the video will be the Spanish lyrics so that you can listen to the music video while following along with the lyrics–this is the intermediate step after you learn what the lyrics mean but before you can just listen to the song and understand everything without the lyrics to read.  Having the actual Spanish being spoken in front of you in written form so you can follow along with the audio allows you to attune your listening comprehension, it’s that intermediate step that gets you to the point where you can understand everything being said without the lyrics to read, they’re sort of like training wheels (thanks to Eiteacher for this suggestion).

2. Under the lyrics will be my translation and analysis of what was said, here is where you’ll actually learn the Spanish that was spoken during the song.  I will post the Spanish lyrics and then the English translation of them.  Use the English lyrics and SpanishDict (I highly recommend you have this open in another tab while you’re doing this) to determine the definition of any words you don’t know (I will cover a lot of the words used, but not all of them)–if the regular definition of a particular word isn’t being used or the word is being used in such a way that simply knowing its definition won’t help you, I will explain it.

3. Next I will pick out various aspects of the Spanish that she’s using that I think require an explanation–I will not cover simple things like the definition of words like “el” (which means “the”), “ser” (which means “to be”), etc. unless there is something about the way they’re being used that I think warrants explanation.  If you don’t understand what a word means, like I said, just check the English translation and/or SpanishDict.  I will link to a lot of external sites with explanations for the grammar used, or the conjugation of a verb used, or the definition of a word–I’m doing this because I don’t have the space here to explain every single detail of what’s going on, there’s an enormous amount of Spanish being used in a single song like this which is precisely why I advocate this method (this is essentially The Telenovela Method, FYI), because you can learn so much from a single song or movie or book, etc.  If you don’t understand a grammatical term that I use and it’s a link, click it!

4. Now, go back and play the verse we just analyzed several times and see if you can hear and understand everything being said, then go on to the next one.

5. If you are confused about anything and feel there’s something I didn’t cover or explain but should have, please let me know in the comments.  As a matter of fact, please leave a comment and let me know what you think regardless, I need feedback and love getting it, each individual comment allows me to make an improvement or fix a problem thereby making this blog just a little bit better each and every time I get feedback of some sort.  Oh, and you can also contact me via my contact form (this will go to my e-mail inbox).

The Video

The Lyrics

Le traigo el remedio
Para ese mal de amor que le estremece
No se merece sufrir
si su pareja le dejó

Tengo toda clase de brebajes, plantas medicinales
Las he traído desde muy lejanos bosques hasta aquí

Soy yerbatero, vengo a curar su mal de amores
Soy el que quita los dolores y habla con los animales
Dígame de que sufre usted
Que yo le tengo un brebaje
Que le devuelve el tono y lo pone bien

Si a usted, señor, lo deja su mujer
úntese en el alma pomadita de clavel
Y para la señora que el marido ha sido infiel
No se preocupe, busquese uno usted también

Sufre de depresión, mal de amor
Lleva varias noches sin dormir
Y sus días no van bien en el trabajo

Anda moribundo, preocupado, cabizbajo, desenamorado
Le tengo la solución si le duele el corazón
No soy doctor, soy yerbatero…
Soy yerbatero, vengo a curar su mal de amores
Soy el que quita los dolores y habla con los animales
Dígame de que sufre usted
Que yo le tengo un brebaje
Que le devuelve el tono y lo pone bien

Si a usted, señor, lo deja su mujer
úntese en el alma pomadita de clavel
Y para la señora que el marido ha sido infiel
No se preocupe, búsquese uno usted también

Si a usted, señor, lo deja su mujer
úntese en el alma pomadita de clavel
Y para la señora que el marido ha sido infiel
No se preocupe, búsquese uno usted también

Soy yerbatero…Soy yerbatero…Soy yerbatero…

Translation and Analysis

First verse:

Le traigo el remedio
Para ese mal de amor que le estremece
No se merece sufrir
si su pareja le dejó

Translation:

I’ll bring you the remedy
For that love sickness that makes you shudder
You don’t deserve to suffer
If your partner left you

Where it says “le estremece”, the verb in question there is “estremecer” which does in fact mean “to shudder or tremble”, but the line immediately after that is where we see something kind of interesting in the phrase “No se merece sufrir”: “merecer” means “to deserve or be worthy of” and can be used in several different ways, not just as above where it means that a person deserves something, but also in the sense of “___ is worth doing”, e.g. “Esa película merece una mirada” = “That movie is worth a look”.

Also, the word “pareja” in the last line usually means “pair” but can also be used to refer to one member of a pair as it is in this case, and one of the literal translations of the word is actually “partner”.

Next:

Tengo toda clase de brebajes, plantas medicinales
Las he traído desde muy lejanos bosques hasta aquí

Translation:

I have every kind of potion, medicinal plants
I have brought them here from distant forests

Oh what a funny word “brebaje” is, because although “potion” is probably the best contextual translation of it here, the actual meaning of the word is something more like “concoction” or “foul drink” and it’s also a slang term for something sailors call “grog“, haha.

Notice the use of “desde” and “hasta” here, even though the contextual translation (correctly) doesn’t show it as it’s literally written, which would be something like “I have brought them from forrests very far away to here”, you’ll almost always see these two words paired up in Spanish to express “from ___ to ____” as “desde ____ hasta _____”.  The expression can not only be used with physical locations but also with time, as in “I’ll be here from this morning until this afternoon” = “Estoy aquí desde esta mañana hasta esta tarde.” “Desde” literally translates as “from” and “hasta” means “until”.

Next verse:

Soy yerbatero, vengo a curar su mal de amores
Soy el que quita los dolores y habla con los animales
Dígame de que sufre usted
Que yo le tengo un brebaje
Que le devuelve el tono y lo pone bien

Which means:

I’m a healer, I’m coming to cure your love sicknesses
I’m the one who takes away the pain and speaks with the animals
Tell me what you suffer from
‘cause I have a potion for you
‘cause I return you to your complexion and it makes you well

Let’s look at the first line where it says “vengo a curar su mal de amores”, now “vengo” is the present first person form of “venir” which means “to come” and “curar” means “to cure or heal”, but what’s interesting is the phrase “su mal de amores”, because “mal” literally translates as “bad” but can be used in so many other ways that all make sense when you understand that the primary definition of the word is “bad”: it can mean evil, harm, damage, or even “bad times” in the context of “in bad times and good” as we saw Shakira use it in her song Suerte where she says “Contigo celebro y sufro todo mis alegrías y mis males” which means “With you I celebrate and suffer everything, the good times and the bad”, or it can mean “illness” as it does in this case.  This is just one of those words that has a billion different meanings depending on the context and that gets used left, right, and center that you should be aware of.

In the sentence “Dígame de que sufre usted” the word order is a little screwy, so let’s have a look at that.  What it literally translates to is “Tell me of that suffer you”, or a little more logically, “Tell me of that which you suffer”, because “de” means “of”, “que” means “that”, and “sufre” is the present 3rd person form of “sufrir“, which means “to suffer”.  Also, “Dígame” is a contraction of “díga” (imperative form of “decir” which means “to tell”) and “me”, which you always do when making a command like that which is reflexive (meaning that the verb acts on a reflexive pronoun like me, te, se, etc.).

In the next sentence where it says “Que yo le tengo un brebaje” you may be confused by the way he’s using “que“, and…it’s honestly very hard to explain, because that word doesn’t really literally translate as “because”, but it’s the best contextual translation of it in these particular circumstances.  Essentially, it means “that” or “so that” here because it’s sort of a continuation of the previous sentence, it relies on the previous sentence to work. Ok, the previous sentence was: “Tell me what you suffer from”, and then this next one says “que yo lo tengo un brebaje” which sort of translates to “Tell me what you suffer from so that/such that I have a potion for you” which sort of makes sense, but if we take what we can tell his meaning is from that sentence and express it as we normally would in English, it would come out as “Tell me what you suffer from ’cause I have a potion for you”, get it?

“Que” is really confusing for beginners because, far more so than “mal”, it has many, many different possible meanings all of which are entirely dependent on the context, and to make things even more confusing there’s an entirely different word that people tend to get confused with it because it’s almost spelled the same way: “qué” (notice the accent! that makes it a whole ‘nother word altogether, “que” does NOT equal “qué”), which is the Spanish word for “what”, which of course means you’ll see it all the time as well, frequently in conjunction with “que” in the same sentence or even side-by-side.

Remember:

“que” = “that”/”so that”/”than”/”such that”/

“qué” = “what”

Deep breath (we’re not done with this verse yet!)

The last line where it says “Que le devuelve el tono y lo pone bien” you see an interesting verb, “devolver” which means “to return” and “le” working as a pronoun meaning “you”, so the verb here, “devolver” is reflecting back on “le”, it’s action is being done to it, so the returning is being done to “le” which is “you” in this case, “le devuelve” means “return you”.

Ok, so we have “que” being used in the same way as the previous line, so “que le devuelve” means “because I return you…”, now “el tono” means “the tone” where tone means “complexion” (check the definition, it’s 2nd) in this case, and taken in the current context of illness and him being the yerbatero, the healer, he’s of course saying that he’ll return you to your previous healthy complexion, he’ll make you better, basically, you see?

That last bit, “lo pone bien” is just saying essentially the same thing again, “pone” is the present 3rd person form of “poner” which means “to put”, and what’s doing the putting? “lo” is, which means “it” and of course refers to the potion, and since “bien” means “good” or “well”, it’s literally saying something like “it puts you well”, which really means “it makes you well”.

Finally, that one’s done.  Next one:

Si a usted, señor, lo deja su mujer
úntese en el alma pomadita de clavel
Y para la señora que el marido ha sido infiel
No se preocupe, busquese uno usted también

Translation:

If your woman leaves you, sir
Rub some carnation oinment on your soul
And for the lady whose husband has been unfaithful
Don’t worry, get yourself some too

Let’s go to the second sentence where it says “úntese en el alma pomadita de clavel”, the verb in question at the beginning there is “untar” which means “to smear” and it’s reflexive here, with “se” filling in for “you”.  “Alma” is the word for “soul”, “pomada” is “ointment” so “pomadita” is “little bit of ointment” really, and “clavel” means “carnation”, so the literal translation of “úntese en el alma pomadita de clavel” is “rub yourself on the soul a little ointment of carnation” which contextually means “rub some carnation oil on your soul”, got it?

Now, in the last line we see “No se preocupe, busquese uno usted también”, “preocupar” means “to worry” and in this case it’s reflexive, which it almost always is, as the way that they say that someone is/was/will worry in Spanish is to say that they “worry themselves” as opposed to just “worry” as we would in English, it essentially means the same thing.

Now, “buscar” (which is what that word you see there, “búsquese”, is based on) is a verb that normally means “to look for or to search”, but a secondary definition for it is “to pick up” as in, “Voy a buscar el correo” = “I’m going to pick up the mail”, which is how it’s used here where it’s translated as “get yourself”.  It’s in the command form and reflexive, with the command form of “buscar” being “busque” and “se” being a pronoun meaning “you” here, so “busquese” means “get yourself” as in “get yourself some of this awesome ointment I’ve got”.

Next verse:

Sufre de depresión, mal de amor
Lleva varias noches sin dormir
Y sus días no van bien en el trabajo

Translation:

Do you suffer from depression, love sickness?
Have you spent many nights without sleeping?
And your days don’t go well at work?

We’ve already discussed “suffrir” and the way that you see “mal” used here with “mal de amor” to mean “love sickness”, so I don’t need to cover that.  “lleva” is the 3rd person present form of “llevar” which literally means “to take, carry, wear, handle, have, keep, deal with, or cope with” but has so many little variations on those meanings depending on the context that to decipher which one it is you have to look at the context, and in this case he’s saying “llevas varias noches sin dormir”, so I would literally translate it as “take” with the meaning as in “take a nap”, “take a class”, etc. so you get “do you take many nights without sleep?”, got it?

The last line where it says “en el trabajo” has “trabajo” functioning as a noun that means “work”, in this case “el trabajo” is referring to your place of work, your job, so you could also translate this last line as “at your job”.

Last bit:

Anda moribundo, preocupado, cabizbajo, desenamorado
Le tengo la solución si le duele el corazón

No soy doctor, soy yerbatero…

Translation:

Continue dying, worried, downcast, unloved?
I have for you the solution if your heart hurts

I’m not a doctor, I’m a healer…

Right, now “moribundo” is simply an adjective that means “dying”, but “anda” is the verb “andar” which usually means “to walk”, right? Well…let’s get confused again, “andar” is also very frequently used to mean “to go” in the sense of indicating action as in “to go do something” usually in the form of “to go [verb]” so it’ll be “andar + verb”.  It sort of makes sense if you think of “andar” as meaning generally “to go” and frequently used to indicate that the person is walking which is, of course, one way you can go about going, right? So it generally means “to go” and is frequently used in the specific context of walking but not always.

Now, “cabizbajo” is just an adjective that means “downcast, crestfallen, or melancholy”, and “desenamorado” is really obvious if you take a second to look at it and you already know that “enamorar” means “to love” and you also know that the way you make a verb’s past participle (the “-ed” version of it, as in “loved” is the past participle of “love”) is to simply add “-ado” to the end of it where the “-ar” at the end was.  So you know that “enamorado” means “loved”, and now I’ll tell you that one way they make a word “un”ed in Spanish (as in, covered –> uncovered, known –> unknown, loved –> unloved) is to add the preposition “des” to the beginning of it, that’s kind of like the Spanish “un”, so:

“des” + “enamorar” + “ado” = “des” + “enamorado” = “desenamorado” = “unloved”

In the next to last line we’ve got “Le tengo la solución si le duele el corazón”.  The first part is pretty simple and you’ve probably got no problem understanding it: “le tengo la solución” – “le” is just a pronoun meaning “you” that’s reflected back on by “tengo” which is the present first person form of “tener” which means “to have” and when you do that it translates as “I have for you the solution…”, and “si” just means “if”.

Then, we see “le” this time filling in for “your heart” and being reflected back on by “duele” which is the third person present form of “doler” which means “to hurt or cause pain” and in this case the “corazón” at the end is simply added for clarification because “le duele” says “it’s hurting” so of course you wonder “what’s hurting?” and “el corazón” is added at the end to clarify, so a more accurate translation that’ll help you understand how that sentence is working would be like this:

“Le tengo la solución si le duele el corazón” = “I have for you the solution if it hurts, your heart that is”

And it’ll make even more sense to us English speakers if we make one more minor little tweak and stick some strategic commas in there:

“Le tengo la solución si le duele, el corazón” = “I have the solution for you if it, your heart, hurts.”

If you’re having trouble understanding, go back and look at those sentences and really pay attention to what I did with the commas, I hope that explains it for you.

Next verse:

Soy yerbatero, vengo a curar su mal de amores
Soy el que quita los dolores y habla con los animales
Dígame de que sufre usted
Que yo le tengo un brebaje
Que le devuelve el tono y lo pone bien

That’s a repeat, we’ve covered it.

Next:

Si a usted, señor, lo deja su mujer
úntese en el alma pomadita de clavel
Y para la señora que el marido ha sido infiel
No se preocupe, búsquese uno usted también

Another repeat. Next:

Si a usted, señor, lo deja su mujer
úntese en el alma pomadita de clavel
Y para la señora que el marido ha sido infiel
No se preocupe, búsquese uno usted también

Another repeat. Next:

Soy yerbatero…Soy yerbatero…Soy yerbatero…

Translation (do I really need to?):

I’m the healer…I’m the healer…I’m the healer…

That’s it, we’re done! I hope that was interesting, let me know what you think in the comments (and would like me to write about in the future), also…  If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below!  Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

This is the 4th in a series of posts I’m doing where I help you learn Spanish from music videos and show you how I do it myself (that way you don’t have to wait for me to dissect a Spanish music video, you can go out and start doing it yourself with whatever songs you want and using it to teach yourself Spanish).  I’ve done three other posts prior to this: the third one on Shakira’s “Ojos Así”, the second one on Shakira’s “Suerte” and the first one on Shakira’s “La Tortura”.  I will eventually move onto another artist for future posts, and if you’ve got any suggestions as far as artists or songs go please put them in the comments, I’d love to hear them.

About This Song

Te Aviso, Te Anuncio is the first song by Shakira that was actually written in English first, titled as Objection (Tango), on her first English-language album ever, the massively successful Laundry Service, which was released in 2001.  So this song was first written (by Shakira) in English, and then she did a Spanish version of it (mind you, she didn’t translate the English version into Spanish, that sort of thing almost never works, she wrote a Spanish version of it that, although similar, definitely isn’t a direct translation).

The song itself starts out as a classical tango between Shakira and her ex-lover with allusions to one of the most famous tango songs of all time, Gerardo Matos Rodríguez’s La Cumparsita, which means “The little parade”, and was originally written in 1917.  It shortly after proceeds into latin rock territory once Shakira’s ex-lover leaves and she starts whaling on an electric guitar.

What follows is…entertaining, to say the least, and frankly downright weird (in an awesome and hilarious way), where Shakira expresses her dissatisfaction with her ex’s behavior via kidnapping him and his new girlfriend, who she also fights with (in cartoon form–note the helpful graphic I’ve provided) while two ‘superheros’ who look like they got their costumes at the Salvation Army proceed to beat up on her ex.  It’s just all kinds of fun, definitely watch it once or twice through just for amusement, it’s worth it 😀

Ground Rules

1. I will post the video below this. The way I want you to do this is to play it once all the way through, then let’s look at it and analyze it one verse at a time.  Below the video will be the Spanish lyrics so that you can listen to the music video while following along with the lyrics–this is the intermediate step after you

learn what the lyrics mean but before you can just listen to the song and understand everything without the lyrics to read.  Having the actual Spanish being spoken in front of you in written form so you can follow along with the audio allows you to attune your listening comprehension, it’s that intermediate step that gets you to the point where you can understand everything being said without the lyrics to read, they’re sort of like training wheels (thanks to Eiteacher for this suggestion).

2. Under the lyrics will be my translation and analysis of what was said, here is where you’ll actually learn the Spanish that was spoken during the song.  I will post the Spanish lyrics and then the English translation of them.  Use the English lyrics and SpanishDict (I highly recommend you have this open in another tab while you’re doing this) to determine the definition of any words you don’t know (I will cover a lot of the words used, but not all of them)–if the regular definition of a particular word isn’t being used or the word is being used in such a way that simply knowing its definition won’t help you, I will explain it.

3. Next I will pick out various aspects of the Spanish that she’s using that I think require an explanation–I will not cover simple things like the definition of words like “el” (which means “the”), “ser” (which means “to be”), etc. unless there is something about the way they’re being used that I think warrants explanation.  If you don’t understand what a word means, like I said, just check the English translation and/or SpanishDict.  I will link to a lot of external sites with explanations for the grammar used, or the conjugation of a verb used, or the definition of a word–I’m doing this because I don’t have the space here to explain every single detail of what’s going on, there’s an enormous amount of Spanish being used in a single song like this which is precisely why I advocate this method (this is essentially The Telenovela Method, FYI), because you can learn so much from a single song or movie or book, etc.  If you don’t understand a grammatical term that I use and it’s a link, click it!

4. Now, go back and play the verse we just analyzed several times and see if you can hear and understand everything being said, then go on to the next one.

5. If you are confused about anything and feel there’s something I didn’t cover or explain but should have, please let me know in the comments.  As a matter of fact, please leave a comment and let me know what you think regardless, I need feedback and love getting it, each individual comment allows me to make an improvement or fix a problem thereby making this blog just a little bit better each and every time I get feedback of some sort.  Oh, and you can also contact me via my contact form (this will go to my e-mail inbox).

The Video

The Lyrics

Nunca pensé que doliera el amor así
Cuándo se entierra en el medio de un no y un sí
Es un dia ella y otro dia yo
Me estás dejando sin corazón
Y cero de razón

Ay, te aviso y te anuncio que hoy renuncio
A tus negocios sucios
Ya sabes que estoy de ti vacunada
A prueba de patadas
Por ti me quedé como Mona Lisa
Sin llanto y sin sonrisa
Que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy, será mejor así

Sé que olvidarte no es asunto sencillo
Te me clavaste en el cuerpo como un cuchillo
Pero todo lo que entra ha de salir
Y los que estan tendrán que partir
Empezando por mi

Ay, te aviso y te anuncio que hoy renuncio
A tus negocios sucios
Ya sabes que estoy de ti vacunada
A prueba de patadas
Por ti me quedé como Mona Lisa
Sin llanto y sin sonrisa
Que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy

Tal vez tú no eras ese para mi
No sé como se puede ya vivir queriendo así

Es tan patético, neurótico, satírico y sicótico
Tú no lo ves, el tango no es de a trés
Ahí voy planeando escapar y me sale al revés
Pero voy a intentarlo una y otra vez, voy

Ay, te aviso te anuncio que hoy renuncio
A tus negocios sucios
Por ti me quedé como Mona Lisa
Sin llanto y sin sonrisa
Te aviso que estoy de ti vacunada
Y no me importa nada
Que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy, será mejor así

Ya me voy, ya me fui
Es mejor así
Ay, que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy
Ay, que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy
¡Será mejor así!

Translation and Analysis

First verse:

Nunca pensé que doliera el amor así
Cuándo se entierra en el medio de un no y un sí
Es un dia ella y otro dia yo
Me estás dejando sin corazón
Y cero de razón

Which translates to:

I never thought love would hurt like this
when you’re buried in the middle of a no and a yes
It’s her one day, me the next
You’re leaving me without a heart
and zero reason [for it]

“Doliera” is the imperfect subjunctive of “doler” which means “to hurt”, the subjunctive in this case is being used because the statement expresses doubt and uncertainty (if you need more help with the subjunctive check out my post on it here: The Spanish Subjunctive Explained). “Se entierra” means “one is interred (buried)” and is the 3rd person singular conjugation of the verb “enterrar” which means “to bury”.  “Medio” means “half” literally and this is how they frequently express “in the middle” or “between”.  “Dejar” means “to leave or to let” and in this case the gerund (“dejando”) is combined with the present “tú” form of “estar” (to be) to express that he is currently (as in right now) leaving her without a heart–note that whenever this is done (you see estar + gerund) instead of just the present form (in this case that would be “dejas”) it means that the action in question is actually happening right now, at that very moment, not potentially 5 minutes (or hours) in the future as can be the case with the present form depending on the context.

Next:

Ay, te aviso y te anuncio que hoy renuncio
A tus negocios sucios
Ya sabes que estoy de ti vacunada
A prueba de patadas
Por ti me quedé como Mona Lisa
Sin llanto y sin sonrisa
Que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy, será mejor así

Which means:

Oh, I’m warning you and I’m announcing to you that today I’m renouncing
your dirty business
You know that I’ve been vaccinated against you
to protect me from your kicks [referring to tango kicks]
Because of you I’m left like Mona Lisa
Without tears and without a smile
Let Heaven and your mother take care of you
I’m leaving, it will be better that way

Ah, here we go, now “avisar“, as you may have guessed, is indeed related to “advise” in that it means “to warn”, and “anunciar” means “to announce”, which I’ve no doubt was chosen so that it would rhyme when she says “hoy renuncio” which means “today I renounce”, so she’s making it clear that she’s loudly and publicly announcing her renunciation of him!

“Negocio” means “business”, pluralized in this case to express the fact that he has got several various dirty dealings that qualify as “dirty business”, and “sucio”, of course, means “dirty”.

A really interesting phrase we see next that I needed some help sorting out is “Ya sabes que estoy de ti vacunada”, which literally translates to “Already you know that I am from you vaccinated” where “vacunado” is the past participle of the verb “vacunar” which means “to vaccinate”; the word order is really screwy here and the lack of punctuation to help out makes it worse.  What she’s saying isn’t “I am of your vaccinated” which is what it looks like, she’s using de to mean “from”, so she’s actually saying “I’m vaccinated against you”, as in “I’m immune to your charms” as we would say in English, but the word order is such that you have to insert a couple of commas to read it properly: “You already know that I am, from you, vaccinated”–that makes sense!

And next up is something even more confusing unless you’re a Spanish-speaking tango dancer: “A prueba de patadas” which means “to be kick-proof” with regards to what she’s vaccinated against (kicks, his kicks).  This refers to the kicks you see in the tango dance, so she’s saying that she’s immune to his sexy dance moves, haha! In this case the word “prueba” is used, which normally means “test”, however when it’s used with “de” like this it can sometimes mean “X-proof”, e.g. “prueba de balas” means “bullet proof”.  And, of course, “patada” means “kick” so when you combine the two in the phrase “prueba de patadas” you get “kicks-proof” 😀

The next thing I’d like to address is the use of “Que” in this statement: “Que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti”.  When you see this in Spanish–it’s hard to spot, you have to go off the context more than anything, though it almost always occurs at the beginning of a sentence or clause–it means literally “that” but it means it in the sense of “That the following may occur” or, a better translation, being “Let the following occur” as in “I want the following to happen”, so when she says “Que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti”, she’s saying “I want that heaven and your mother take care of you”…sort of…make sense?

Next verse:

Sé que olvidarte no es asunto sencillo
Te me clavaste en el cuerpo como un cuchillo
Pero todo lo que entra ha de salir
Y los que estan tendrán que partir
Empezando por mi

Which translates to:

I know that forgetting you isn’t a simple matter
You drove a knife through my heart
But all that comes in must go out
And those that are [still in] will have to go
Starting with me

“Olvidarte” is the infinitive of the verb “olvidar“, which means “to forget”, with “te” added on to the end which directs the action of “olvidar” to “te” (you) in this case.  In that same sentence we see a very interesting, and commonly used, word with multiple meantings: “asunto“.  Which, in this case, means “matter”, but can also mean similar things such as “issue” (in the sense of a problem) or “affair” (in the sense of a situation, not a romantic affair), and is also used when Spanish-speakers say the equivalent of our English expressions, “It’s none of your business” by saying “No es asunto tuyo” (literally, “it’s not your affair”), and “The thing is that…” by saying “El asunto es que…” (literally, “the issue is that”).  Also, “sencillo” means “simple”, so her expression “asunto sencillo” obviously means “simple matter” as in “it’s not a simple matter”.

The next line includes the verb “clavar” to express that her lover has proverbially driven a knife or stake through her heart, as we would say, and “clavar” literally translates to “to nail, drive, or thrust” in reference to stabbing or driving a sharp object such as a knife or nail into something.  Notice the exact wording of the expression that’s actually used in this case and you’ll see it’s clear that it’s a metaphor: “Te me clavaste en el cuerpo como un cuchillo” which literally means “You stabbed me in the body like a knife” so she’s saying that he has caused her great and sudden pain like when someone stabs you with a knife, except her pain is emotional, it’s just like when we refer to “our heart” in English in reference to emotions and romance: we’re talking about the symbolic heart, that which represents our feelings, not the real one, and you see it when we say that a lover/ex “stabbed us in the heart” or, the more recently popular and funny expression, “He/she crapped on my heart!” 😀

After that there’s the expression “Y los que estan tendrán que partir” and I’d like to point out that the word “tendrán” is actually the third person plural future of the verb “tener” (click to see the full conjugation) so what’s literally being said is “And those that are will have to leave” because, as you probably already know, “estar” is always used to indicate the presence of something in a certain location (you would say “Estoy en Bogotá”, not “Soy en Bogotá”), and so she’s saying “those which are still there” by saying “los que estan”, and the way that “have to” is most commonly said in Spanish is by using “tener + que + [action]”, e.g. “I have to go” = “Tengo que ir”, and since she wants to say that these things (plural) will have to go (if they’re there) she does this by using the future conjugation in the “ustedes” form, which is “tendrán”. Got it?

And, of course, the last line, “Empezando por mi” means “beginning with me” (in reference to that which will have to go) as “empezando” is the gerund (“-ing” version) of the verb “empezar” which means “to begin”.

Next verse:

Ay, te aviso y te anuncio que hoy renuncio
A tus negocios sucios
Ya sabes que estoy de ti vacunada
A prueba de patadas
Por ti me quedé como Mona Lisa
Sin llanto y sin sonrisa
Que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy

Which is just a repeat of a verse we covered before. Next:

Tal vez tú no eras ese para mi
No sé como se puede ya vivir queriendo así

Which means:

Maybe you weren’t that for me
I don’t know how anyone can even live
Wanting like this

Now, the first line, “Tal vez tú no eras ese para mi”, is in reference to the previous verse where she said “Me voy, será mejor así” in the last line which means “I’m leaving, it will be best that way”, so she’s saying that maybe he wasn’t the best for her (“ese” in the first line of the current verse refers to “mejor” in the last line of the previous verse).  Oh, and “tal vez” is a very common expression that means “perhaps” or “maybe”.

Next verse:

Es tan patético, neurótico, satírico y sicótico
Tú no lo ves, el tango no es de a trés
Ahí voy planeando escapar y me sale al revés
Pero voy a intentarlo una y otra vez, voy

Which means:

It’s so pathetic and neurotic and satirical and psychotic
Don’t you see? Tango is not for three
There I go planning to escape and I get the opposite
But I’m going to try it one more time, I’m leaving!

Ok, this is cute and kinda funny at this point.  The first line is the funniest, but it’s also pretty obvious and I don’t think there’s anything there I need to explain, do I? I guess I’ll mention that “tan” is a very common word that means “so” in the sense of “a lot”, and a very similar word that you’ll frequently confuse it with is “tal” which means “such”.

Where she says “me sale al revés” that literally translates to “It takes me out backwards” but this is an idiomatic expression meaning “I get the opposite” because “al revés” means “the wrong way round”, “sale” is in the 3rd person present so it means “it takes out” (that is, “it” is the one doing the taking out, not her) and it’s reflexive so it’s happening to her: “me sale al revés” = “it takes me out the wrong way round”.

In the last line you see the verb “intentar” which means “to try” and with “lo” tacked onto the end, of course, it means “to try it”.

Next verse:

Ay, te aviso te anuncio que hoy renuncio
A tus negocios sucios
Por ti me quedé como Mona Lisa
Sin llanto y sin sonrisa
Te aviso que estoy de ti vacunada
Y no me importa nada
Que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy, será mejor así

Which is the third repeat of that same verse we previously dealt with. Next:

Ya me voy, ya me fui
Es mejor así
Ay, que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy
Ay, que el cielo y tu madre cuiden de ti
Me voy
¡Será mejor así!

Which is a repeat except for the first line which means “I’m going already, I’ve already left” due to “ya” (“already” or “now”) at the beginning of the sentence, and then “fui” is the preterite “yo” form of “ir” (“to go”) that means “I left” when used reflexively (“se/me/te/etc.”) in this case with “me”.

That’s it! We’re done.  I love doing this with music videos, TV shows, movies, etc., you learn an enormous amount of the language just from a few minutes of one of those.  Any suggestions for how to go forth with this? Modifications? Improvements?  Let me know what you think in the comments, also…  If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below!  Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

This is the 3rd in a series of posts I’m doing where I help you learn Spanish from music videos and show you how I do it myself (that way you don’t have to wait for me to dissect a Spanish music video, you can go out and start doing it yourself with whatever songs you want and using it to teach yourself Spanish–mind you, the whole point of this blog is to show you how you can teach yourself Spanish).  I’ve done two other posts prior to this: the second one on Shakira’s “Suerte” and the first one on Shakira’s “La Tortura”.  I may move onto another artist for future posts, and if you’ve got any suggestions as far as artists or songs go please put them in the comments, I’d love to hear them.

About this song

“Ojos Así” means “Eyes like those” and the song itself is actually over a decade old (originally released on

the album Donde Están Los Ladrones? on July 24th, 1999) though it still remains one of Shakira’s most popular Spanish-language songs and the 5th most successful song of her career.  One of the really interesting aspects of this song is that it contains some Arabic lyrics in the form of chants, which are based on the Phrygian dominant scale, which is a musical scale extremely common in Arabic and especially Egyptian music, which is why it was chosen for Ojos Así, so that it would lend an Arabic feel to the song (notice the neon Eye of Ra in the background of the video).

Ground Rules

1. I will post the video below this. The way I want you to do this is to play it once all the way through, then let’s look at it and analyze it one verse at a time.  Below the video will be the Spanish lyrics so that you can listen to the music video while following along with the lyrics–this is the intermediate step after you learn what the lyrics mean but before you can just listen to the song and understand everything without the lyrics to read.  Having the actual Spanish being spoken in front of you in written form so you can follow along with the audio allows you to attune your listening comprehension, it’s that intermediate step that gets you to the point where you can understand everything being said without the lyrics to read, they’re sort of like training wheels (thanks to Eiteacher for this suggestion).

2. Under the lyrics will be my translation and analysis of what was said, here is where you’ll actually learn the Spanish that was spoken during the song.  I will post the Spanish lyrics and then the English translation of them.  Use the English lyrics and SpanishDict (I highly recommend you have this open in another tab while you’re doing this) to determine the definition of any words you don’t know (I will cover a lot of the words used, but not all of them)–if the regular definition of a particular word isn’t being used or the word is being used in such a way that simply knowing its definition won’t help you, I will explain it.

3. Next I will pick out various aspects of the Spanish that she’s using that I think require an explanation–I will not cover simple things like the definition of words like “el” (which means “the”), “ser” (which means “to be”), etc. unless there is something about the way they’re being used that I think warrants explanation.  If you don’t understand what a word means, like I said, just check the English translation and/or SpanishDict.  I will link to a lot of external sites with explanations for the grammar used, or the conjugation of a verb used, or the definition of a word–I’m doing this because I don’t have the space here to explain every single detail of what’s going on, there’s an enormous amount of Spanish being used in a single song like this which is precisely why I advocate this method (this is essentially The Telenovela Method, FYI), because you can learn so much from a single song or movie or book, etc.  If you don’t understand a grammatical term that I use and it’s a link, click it!

4. Now, go back and play the verse we just analyzed several times and see if you can hear and understand everything being said, then go on to the next one.

5. If you are confused about anything and feel there’s something I didn’t cover or explain but should have, please let me know in the comments.  As a matter of fact, please leave a comment and let me know what you think regardless, I need feedback and love getting it, each individual comment allows me to make an improvement or fix a problem thereby making this blog just a little bit better each and every time I get feedback of some sort.  Oh, and you can also contact me via my contact form (this will go to my e-mail inbox).

The Video

The Lyrics

Ayer conocí un cielo sin sol
y un hombre sin suelo
Un santo en prisión
y una canción triste sin dueño
Ya he ya he ya la he
Y conocí tus ojos negros
ya he ya he ya la he
Y ahora sí que no
puedo vivir sin ellos yo

Le pido al cielo sólo un deseo
Que en tus ojos yo pueda vivir
He recorrido ya el mundo entero
y una cosa te vengo a decir
Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
Como los que tienes tú

Rabbul samae, fecal rajae
Fe aynaha aral hayati
Ati elaica men hazal caouni
Arjouca rabbi, labbi nadae

Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
como los que tienes tú

Ayer vi pasar una mujer
debajo de su camello
Un río de sal y un barco
abandonado en el desierto
ya he ya he ya la he
Y vi pasar tus ojos negros
ya he ya he ya la he
Y ahora sí que no
puedo vivir sin ellos yo

Le pido al cielo sólo un deseo
Que en tus ojos yo pueda vivir
He recorrido ya el mundo entero
y una cosa te vengo a decir
Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
Como los que tienes tú

Rabbul samae, fecal rajae
Fe aynaha aral hayati
Ati elaica men hazal caouni
Arjouca rabbi, labbi nadae

Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
como los que tienes tú

Rabbul samae, fecal rajae
Fe aynaha aral hayati
Ati elaica men hazal caouni
Arjouca rabbi, labbi nadae

Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
como los que tienes tú

Le pido al cielo sólo un deseo
Que en tus ojos yo pueda vivir
He recorrido ya el mundo entero
y una cosa te vengo a decir
Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
Como los que tienes tú

Translation and Analysis

First verse:

Ayer conocí un cielo sin sol
y un hombre sin suelo
Un santo en prisión
y una canción triste sin dueño
Ya he ya he ya la he
Y conocí tus ojos negros
ya he ya he ya la he
Y ahora sí que no
puedo vivir sin ellos yo

Translation:

Yesterday I met a sky without sun
and a man without nation
A saint in prison
and a sad song without an owner
Ya he ya he ya la he [chorus/chanting]
And I met your black eyes
Ya he ya he ya la he [chorus/chanting]
And now I really can’t
live without them

Ok, first I’d like to talk about the verb “Conocer” which is used in the first sentence in the preterit form “conocí” (in this case meaning “I met”) and literally means “to know” in Spanish, but actually can be used in several different ways and a better translation of it might be “to be familiar with” because it’s almost exclusively used to refer to familiarity with people and places, it’s never used to state that you know a fact (that’s what “saber” is for).  If you check the definition for “conocer” there you’ll see that the second definition is “to meet”, and the reason for this is that a more accurate translation of “conocer” is “to become familiar with [a person]” and the way that we say that in English is “to meet”, as in “I met him”.  The reason one of the definitions of “conocer” is “to know” is that, in the specific context in English of expressing your familiarity with a person or place, you say that you “know” them/it.  The problem with this is that people will read that definition and think that “conocer” works for other contexts where we would use “know” and it doesn’t.  I would ask you to note the fact that, really, the very best translation of “conocer” is “to become familiar with”, if you’ll keep that in mind you’ll never have trouble with it.

Not too much interesting after that, but at the end we get to something that looks a bit odd: “Y ahora sí que no puedo vivir sin ellos yo”.  What’s that “sí” doing there? “And now yes I can’t live without you”? No, but…sort of.

“Sí”, in addition to meaning “yes”, is frequently used for emphasis and if you’ll check the definition of it you’ll see that the 2nd one under “uso enfático” (“emphatic use”) covers this.  When it’s used in this context it most closely translates as “really” or “certainly” and is used to add weight to the statement that comes immediately after it, e.g. “¡Sí, sí quiero ir!” = “Yes, I really want to go!” and you’ll quite frequently see it used immediately after it has just been used to mean “yes” as in the above example.

Next verse:

Le pido al cielo sólo un deseo
Que en tus ojos yo pueda vivir
He recorrido ya el mundo entero
y una cosa te vengo a decir
Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
Como los que tienes tú

Translation:

I ask heaven for only one wish
That in your eyes I could live
I have already wandered around the entire world
and I have come to tell you just one thing
I traveled from Bahrain all the way to Beirut
I went from the north to the south pole
and I didn’t find eyes like those
Like the ones you have

Ok, so we first get “pido” which is the present “yo” form of “pedir” which means “to ask or order”, “cielo” as I hope you’ve figured out literally means “sky” but in this sense figuratively refers to heaven, “deseo” comes from the verb “desear” (“to desire”) and means, in this context, a wish or desire (I went with “wish”).  I’d like to note that a LOT of nouns in Spanish are derived from their verbs, e.g. an “order” (noun) in Spanish is “un pedido” and the verb meaning “to order” is “pedir”, a scream (noun) in Spanish is “un grito” and the verb for “to scream” is “gritar”, and there are a LOT of those, so many in fact, that if you know the verb but not the noun or vice-versa you can often safely make a guess based on the one you do know, and even if it’s not exactly right people will know what you mean and can tell you what the correct word is.

Next we get “Que en tus ojos yo pueda vivir” and the first use of the subjunctive (need help? see my article here: The Spanish Subjunctive Explained) which makes sense because she’s making a wish (the first “W” in W.E.I.R.D.O., right?).  After that we see the verb “recorrer” used in the form of its participle “recorrido”: “recorrer” really means “to travel through” and in this context is best translated as “wandered around” since she’s talking about the whole world and saying that you’ve traveled “through the world” would get the message across, but not very well.

“Vengo” is the present “yo” form of “venir” and I’m mentioning it I suppose because it has an irregular conjugation. “Viajé” is the preterit “yo” form of “viajar” which means “to travel”.  Now, “hasta” is a bit interesting because of what it usually means and how it’s actually used here when she says “Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut”: it literally means “until” but is often used the way we would use “to” in the context of “from ___ to ___” as it is here where she’s saying “from Bahrein to Beirut”. “Desde” means “from” or “since” and is often seen used in conjunction with “hasta” as it is here: “Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur”.

Next, “encontré” is the preterit of “encontrar” which means “to find”, and then we get to “Como los que tienes tú”: “los” is the plural version of “lo” which is a direct object pronoun used in a way in Spanish that’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s sort of like how we use “that” in a very specific context: “that which is”, so in this case “los que _____” means “those which  ______”, so “Como los que tienes tú” literally means “those which you have”.

Right, next verse:

Rabbul samae, fecal rajae
Fe aynaha aral hayati
Ati elaica men hazal caouni
Arjouca rabbi, labbi nadae

That’s the Arabic, and the above is the best transcription of it I could find, if you speak Arabic and want to help with that or the following translation, you’re more than welcome to in the comments.  Here’s the translation I found for it:

Lord of heaven, I’m calling you
In his eyes I see my life
I come to you from this world
Oh God, please answer my call

Next:

Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
como los que tienes tú

Which is just a repeat of what we’ve already heard. Next.

Ayer vi pasar una mujer
debajo de su camello
Un río de sal y un barco
abandonado en el desierto
ya he ya he ya la he
Y vi pasar tus ojos negros
ya he ya he ya la he
Y ahora sí que no
puedo vivir sin ellos yo

Which means:

Yesterday I saw a woman passing
underneath her camel
A river of salt and a boat
abandoned in the desert
And I saw your black eyes pass by
And now I cannot
live without them

You’ll notice that she says “vi pasar una mujer” where “vi” is the preterit of “ver” (“to see”), which is fine, but then you see the infinitive, “pasar” (“to pass” in this case), being used oddly where we would say “passing”: the infinitive in Spanish can be used in this way, and often is as opposed to the strictly correct gerund–the gerund is the “-ing” version of a word, and is represented in Spanish by adding “ando” to “-ar” verbs and “iendo” for “-ir” and “-er” verbs, so the proper gerund of “pasar” in this case would be “pasando”, but it’s not used because the more common way of saying that would be to just use the infinitive as she did.  The gerund is, by far, most commonly used in conjunction with “estar” (scroll down to the 14th definition, lol it’s there) to express the fact that something is being done right now at that very moment, e.g. “Sí, estoy escuchando” = “Yes, I’m listening”, or “Estoy barriendo el suelo” = “I’m sweeping the floor” whereas “Barro el suelo” more likely means “I’ll sweep the floor [in a minute]”.

“Debajo” means “below” or “underneath” in this case.  Then everything is normal until we get down to “Y ahora sí que no” where we again see “sí” used emphatically (instead of to mean “yes” as it normally would) which we covered earlier.

The next verses are just repeats of what we’ve covered before:

Le pido al cielo sólo un deseo
Que en tus ojos yo pueda vivir
He recorrido ya el mundo entero
y una cosa te vengo a decir
Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
Como los que tienes tú

Rabbul samae, fecal rajae
Fe aynaha aral hayati
Ati elaica men hazal caouni
Arjouca rabbi, labbi nadae

Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
como los que tienes tú

Rabbul samae, fecal rajae
Fe aynaha aral hayati
Ati elaica men hazal caouni
Arjouca rabbi, labbi nadae

Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
como los que tienes tú

Le pido al cielo sólo un deseo
Que en tus ojos yo pueda vivir
He recorrido ya el mundo entero
y una cosa te vengo a decir
Viajé de Bahrein hasta Beirut
Fuí desde el norte hasta el polo sur
y no encontré ojos así
Como los que tienes tú

Yes.  Lots of repeat, I know (I’m actually happy because that makes my job of translating and analyzing this stuff that much easier 😛 ), but…we’re done!  I have to admit, I really love that song, and I also think Shakira looks waaaaaay better as a brunette, especially with the dreadlocks and everything, definitely hot (she looks good as a blonde as well, but I still prefer her with her natural color).

Oh, by the way, regarding the Arabic in this song, you do know that Shakira is part Lebanese, right? Her father is of Lebanese descent, she does speak some Arabic, and she’s always had Middle Eastern influence on her music and performances.  In fact, from the section of her Wikipedia article that talks about her influences:

She has also been influenced by her Arab heritage, which was a major inspiration for her breakthrough world hit “Ojos Así“. She told Portuguese TV “Many of my movements belong to Arab culture.”

Very cool, huh?

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

And now we get to the second installment of our “learning Spanish from music videos” thing I’m doing based roughly on The Telenovela Method where we use popular entertainment media like music, TV shows, and movies to learn Spanish.  The first installment was based on Shakira’s ‘La Tortura’, which you should check out there if you haven’t already.

This time it’s Shakira’s ‘Suerte’ (next time I might pick a different artist, though I’ve already started listening to ‘Ojos Asi’, so you may have to put up with Shakira one more time before we move onto someone else) and it shouldn’t be as long as the ‘La Tortura’ post, but no promises.  “Suerte“, by the way, means “luck/lucky”.  The theme of the song, again, is some guy she likes, except this time instead of giving him the boot (“a otro perro con ese hueso!”, haha) for banging some other chick, she’s

professing her love, acknowledging her shortcomings (small breasts that cannot be confused with mountains 🙁 ), and begging him to stay with her if he feels the same way.  Let’s dive right in.

Ground Rules

1. I will post the video below this. The way I want you to do this is to play it once all the way through, then let’s look at it and analyze it one verse at a time.  Below the video will be the Spanish lyrics so that you can listen to the music video while following along with the lyrics–this is the intermediate step after you learn what the lyrics mean but before you can just listen to the song and understand everything without the lyrics to read.  Having the actual Spanish being spoken in front of you in written form so you can follow along with the audio allows you to attune your listening comprehension, it’s that intermediate step that gets you to the point where you can understand everything being said without the lyrics to read, they’re sort of like training wheels (thanks to Eiteacher for this suggestion).

2. Under the lyrics will be my translation and analysis of what was said, here is where you’ll actually learn the Spanish that was spoken during the song.  I will post the Spanish lyrics and then the English translation of them.  Use the English lyrics and SpanishDict (I highly recommend you have this open in another tab while you’re doing this) to determine the definition of any words you don’t know (I will cover a lot of the words used, but not all of them)–if the regular definition of a particular word isn’t being used or the word is being used in such a way that simply knowing its definition won’t help you, I will explain it.

3. Next I will pick out various aspects of the Spanish that she’s using that I think require an explanation–I will not cover simple things like the definition of words like “el” (which means “the”), “ser” (which means “to be”), etc. unless there is something about the way they’re being used that I think warrants explanation.  If you don’t understand what a word means, like I said, just check the English translation and/or SpanishDict.  I will link to a lot of external sites with explanations for the grammar used, or the conjugation of a verb used, or the definition of a word–I’m doing this because I don’t have the space here to explain every single detail of what’s going on, there’s an enormous amount of Spanish being used in a single song like this which is precisely why I advocate this method (this is essentially The Telenovela Method, FYI), because you can learn so much from a single song or movie or book, etc.  If you don’t understand a grammatical term that I use and it’s a link, click it!

4. Now, go back and play the verse we just analyzed several times and see if you can hear and understand everything being said, then go on to the next one.

5. If you are confused about anything and feel there’s something I didn’t cover or explain but should have, please let me know in the comments.  As a matter of fact, please leave a comment and let me know what you think regardless, I need feedback and love getting it, each individual comment allows me to make an improvement or fix a problem thereby making this blog just a little bit better each and every time I get feedback of some sort.  Oh, and you can also contact me via my contact form (this will go to my e-mail inbox).

The Video

(Please note: if you’re in a country where this video is blocked for you try here, here, or here)

The Lyrics

Suerte que en el Sur hayas nacido
Y que burlemos las distancias

Suerte que es haberte conocido
Y por ti amar tierras extrañas

Yo puedo escalar los Andes solo
Por ir a contar tus lunares

Contigo celebro y sufro todo
mis alegrías
Y mis males
Lo ro lo le lo le
Lo ro lo le lo le

Sabes que
Estoy a tus pies

Contigo, mi vida
Quiero vivir la vida
Lo que me queda de vida
Quiero vivir contigo

Suerte que es tener labios sinceros
Para besarte con mas ganas
Suerte que mis pechos sean pequeños
Y no los confundas con montañas

Suerte que herede las piernas firmes
Para correr si me hace falta,
Y estos dos ojos que me dicen
Que han de llorar cuando te vayas

Le ro lo le lo le
Le ro lo le lo le

Sabes que
Estoy a tus pies

Le ro lo le lo le
La felicidad tiene tu nombre
y tu piel

Ya sabes, mi vida
Estoy hasta el cuello por ti
Si sientes algo así
Quiero que te quedes junto a mi

Translation and Analysis

And here’s the first stanza and then the translation:

Suerte que en el Sur hayas nacido
Y que burlemos las distancias

Which translates to:

It’s lucky that you were born in the south [meaning South America]
and that we can make fun of the distance

Ok, the first thing you’ll notice is the use of the subjunctive–which I’ll be making a separate, and very comprehensive, post on quite shortly it’s now up: The Spanish Subjunctive Explained–with the verb “hayas”, which means “you have” and is in the subjunctive because she’s saying that it’s lucky that this happened, which is a personal expression of opinion and therefore requires the subjunctive.  “Nacido” is the past participle of the verb “nacer“, which means to be born.

The next word we come to is a bit tricky, and I honestly have to admit I’m not sure I’ve nailed the translation (if not, I’m sure I’ll hear about it in the comments): burlar.  Its primary definition is “to evade”, however it could also mean “to make fun of or mock”, and in this case it could be either one, however I personally think that “evade” or “get around”, i.e. “overcome”, makes more sense–maybe they’re making fun of the distance between them, but it makes more sense to me that she’s saying that they’re lucky they got around it.  Also, “burlemos” is the present subjunctive form of “burlar” (the subjunctive gets a lot of play in this song). Edit [07/13/2012–a year and a half later, haha]: Nah, I’ve changed my mind on this.  Someone asked about it in the comments and mentioned that in her English version of the song in this verse she says “Lucky you were born that far away/ So we could both make fun of distance ” so I’m going to go with the “mocking/making fun of” translation instead.  Thanks, Miranda! And if you have a correction for any post on this blog you think might be right, please leave it in the comments, I always appreciate it not only because I get to correct an error I would have otherwise missed which makes my blog just a little bit better but I learn something, too!

Next stanza:

Suerte que es haberte conocido
Y por ti amar tierras extrañas

Which means:

It’s lucky to have known you
and because of you I love foreign lands

“Conocido” is the past participle of “conocer” which means “to know [a person]” (“saber” is used when referring to facts). “Por” in this case means “for” as in “because of”, “amar” means “to love”, though I should point out that when Spanish-speakers want to say that they love somebody (lover, wife, parent, child, etc.), they say “te quiero”, not “te amo”; “amar” has a bit more of a deep, poetic connotation to it and can come off as kind of cheesy or weird if not used properly and, also, it’s only used to express romantic love.

Next:

Yo puedo escalar los Andes solo
Por ir a contar tus lunares

Which translates to:

I can climb the Andes alone
to go and count your moles

“Escalar” means to climb, “los Andes” obviously refers to the Andes mountains (remember, Shakira is Colombian and the Andes cut right through Colombia), a “lunar” in this case is a mole or beauty mark.

Next:

Contigo celebro y sufro todo
mis alegrías
Y mis males
Lo ro lo le lo le
Lo ro lo le lo le

Sabes que
Estoy a tus pies

Which means:

With you I celebrate and suffer everything
The good times and the bad

le ro lo le etc. etc.

You know that I’m at your feet.

“Contigo” is a contraction of “con” and “tú” (you would never say “con tú”, you’d always say “contigo”), “celebrar” means to celebrate, “suffrir” means to suffer, so far so good.

Now we come to “alegrías” and “males”, which is where it gets tricky because there isn’t really a good direct English translation of either of these words, “joy” is pretty close for “alegría” but it more literally means “happy things” or “happy times” depending on the context, and the same thing with “males” which is the plural of “mal” which is normally an adjective that simply means “bad”, though it can also be a noun, as it is in this case, that means “bad things” or “bad times”.

Lastly, you see the previously mentioned “saber” being used here to state a fact: that she’s at his feet (“sabes que estoy a tus pies”).

Next:

Contigo, mi vida
Quiero vivir la vida
Lo que me queda de vida
Quiero vivir contigo

Which means:

With you, my dear [lit. “life”]
I want to live life
What I have left of life
I want to live with you

You see “contigo” again, “vida” literally means “life” and in this first use (“contigo, mi vida”) it’s used to refer to her lover, she’s say that he’s “her life”, then it’s immediately used in its literal sense, I’m sure on purpose, sort of like someone saying “I love you, my love” where “love” is first used as a verb and then as a pronoun.

She then says “Lo que me queda de vida”: we’ve discussed what it means when you see “lo” used like this in the previous ‘La Tortura’ post, but we’ll quickly revisit it: “lo” is a direct object pronoun used in a way in Spanish that’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s sort of like how we use “that” in a very specific context: “that which is”, so in this case “lo que _____” means “that which ______”, so “lo que me queda de vida” literaly means “that which I have left of life”, got it?

Oh, and in case you didn’t figure it out, “quedar” means “to be left or remain”, so in this case with it being reflexive towards “me”, it means “what’s left to me / what remains for me”.

Next verse:

Suerte que es tener labios sinceros
Para besarte con mas ganas
Suerte que mis pechos sean pequeños
Y no los confundas con montañas

And that translates to:

It’s lucky that I have sincere lips
So I can kiss you passionately
Lucky that my breasts are small
And that you don’t confuse them with mountains

“Labio” means “lip”, “sincero”, as you’ve likely guessed, means “sincere” or “honest”.  “Besar” means “to kiss”, and tacking the “te” on the end means “to kiss you”.

Now, the “con mas ganas” part is the one that’s going to require a bit of explanation: much to my consternation, I can’t find a Spanish dictionary anywhere that recognizes “ganas” as a noun, but it is a noun and it’s used as a noun here in this particular instance.  Normally it would be the present “tu” form of “ganar“, which means “to win”, but not in this case.  I personally, from experience and context, would translate it as “enthusiasm”, “appetite”, or “passion”, and now I just tried plugging it into a couple translation engines and they recognize it as a noun and all three of them (Google, Yahoo, and Babel) define it as “desire” which is one I didn’t think of and would probably work just as well as my translation of “passion” in that I could’ve translated that sentence as: “So I can kiss you with more desire”.

After that we get to…boobies!  Indeed.  No clue why she says this, but she does: “pechos” means “breasts” (in the sense of a woman’s breasts), but do remember that “pecho”, singular, just means “chest” in the normal sense (I know you want to know so I’ll tell you: “tetas” is how you say “tits” or “boobs”).  “Los” is the plural of the previously explained direct object pronoun “lo” and refers to her breasts, “confundir” means “to confuse”, and “montaña” means “mountain”.  Next!

The following stanza is:

Suerte que herede las piernas firmes
Para correr si me hace falta,
Y estos dos ojos que me dicen
Que han de llorar cuando te vayas

Which means:

It’s lucky that I inherited strong legs
so that I can run if I need to
and these two eyes tell me
that they have to cry when you leave

Now we run into a verb you likely haven’t heard before, “heredar“, which means “to inherit” and isn’t especially notable except for the fact that you don’t hear it often – it can mean to inherit either money or a certain physical or personality trait from your parents.  “Pierna” is “leg”, “firma” means “strong” or “firm” depending on the context (in this case I think “strong” makes more sense, though they do look quite firm as well 😀 ).

Then we come to “Para correr si me hace falta”: “correr” means “to run”, but where it gets complicated is at “me hace falta”…now, this particular phrase, “hacer falta”, can have multiple meanings: usually, it’s used to indicate that something’s needed, necessary, lacking, or missing (see the 2nd definition of “falta” under “also: hacer falta”), e.g. “me hace falta suerte” which means “I need some luck” or “Me hace falta sucra” which means “I’m lacking sugar” or “I need some sugar”. The reason for this is that the secondary definiton of “falta”, after the primary definition of “mistake”, is “lack or absence”, and since “hacer” means “to make or do” when you say “hacer falta” you’re “making lack” or “making need/necessity”. Now, when you put “me” before a verb it becomes reflexive back on you so that whatever that verb is doing, it’s doing to you, and so consequently when you say “me hace falta” you’re literally saying “it makes a lack for me” or “it creates an absence for/to me”, you see? It sorta makes sense, haha.

Next, she goes on to talk about his eyes (how typical) and says “Y es que tus dos ojos me dicen que han de llorar cuando te vayas”: “ojo” means “eye”, that’s simple, but what’s this “han de llorar”?  Well, “llorar” means “to cry”, that’s easy enough, but the use of “haber” here is rather odd: in this case it means “to have to”, as in “to have to cry”–normally that’s expressed with “tener que”, but if you’ll scroll down to the 3rd definition for haber (here) you’ll see:

haber de hacer algo -> to have to do something

So it can be used to express obligation, to say “to have to”, but it’s unusual and I’ll tell you that 98% of the time I’ve heard someone say that someone has to do something in Spanish, they’ve used “tener que”, not “haber de”, but it can (and is, obviously) done, so it should be noted.

Lastly, we get to “te vayas” which is the present tú subjunctive of “irse” which is a very common Spanish way of saying “to go” in reference to a person leaving to go somewhere and makes sense if you think about it: it’s reflexive, so again the verb is doing whatever it is it does to the person that the reflexive pronoun represents, in this case that verb is “ir” and so “se va”, for example, literally means “you make yourself go” or “me voy” means “I make myself go” (FYI “me voy” is a very common way of saying “I’m leaving”).

Now…you’ll notice that in this particular case it’s in the subjunctive (“te vayas” instead of “te vas”)–why?  Well, she says “cuando te vayas” meaning “when you leave”, but his leaving isn’t certain, it’s very much an if/when-you-leave sort of thing, it’s unknown, it’s not a concrete thing, he isn’t scheduled to depart at precisely 9 AM the next morning so therefore we have uncertainty and therefore we have…the subjunctive! Yaaaaay!

Next:

Le ro lo le lo le
Le ro lo le lo le

Sabes que
Estoy a tus pies

This is just a repeat chorus, we’ve covered this.  Next.

Le ro lo le lo le
La felicidad tiene tu nombre
y tu piel

The word for “happiness” in Spanish is “la felicidad”, and the word for “skin” is “piel”, so what she’s saying here when she literally says “happiness has your name and your skin” is that happiness is, to her, the sound of his name and the feel of his skin against hers…daaaawwwwww, so cute (it’s late, I’m getting weird).

The next, and final verse (though it’s repeated a couple times) is:

Ya sabes, mi vida
Estoy hasta el cuello por ti
Si sientes algo así
Quiero que te quedes junto a mi

Which means:

You already know, my love [lit. “my life”]
I’m up to my neck because of you
If you feel the same way
I want you to stay together with me

As you should already know, “ya” means “still” or “already”, and as we mentioned previously “mi vida” can be used to mean “my love” because in this case she’s saying “my life” in that he is her life, so that’s why we translated it that way.

Now, “estoy hasta el cuello”: “hasta” means “until”, “up to”, or “as far as” and “cuello” means “neck”, so she’s saying she’s up to her neck because of him (up to her neck with what, I don’t know–I’m honestly not quite sure what she’s trying to say here).  Then she says “si siente algo así” (“sentir” means “to feel”) which literally means “if you feel something like this”, because “algo” means “something” and “así” means “this way or like this”.

Next she says “Quiero que te quedes junto a mi” which is something like “I want that you keep yourself together with me” because, as we’ve discussed, “quedar” means “to remain or keep” and “junto” means “together”.  Now, when “quedar” is made to be reflexive, as in this case, it means “to stay” (if you’ll look at the definition for “quedar” and scroll waaay down to the heading “Pronominal Verb”, you’ll see it) in the personal sense because the verb (“to keep”) is being done to the person it’s reflexive upon, so when you say “te quedes” you’re saying “you keep yourself” meaning “you stay” and…did you notice something else? “te quedes” is in the subjunctive 🙂 Why?  Because when she says “Quiero que te quedes” she’s making a wish (first letter in W.E.I.R.D.O., right?), she’s expressing a desire, and that always requires the subjunctive.

That’s it folks, we’re done.  Again, I congratulate you if you’ve made it this far because if you have you’ve learned a lot of Spanish in the process.  I hope that was interesting, let me know what you think in the comments (and would like me to write about in the future), also…  If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below!  Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

One of the best possible ways to learn Spanish is to use Spanish-language popular media (TV shows, music, movies, etc.) that you actually enjoy (really important here) and/or are interested in, because it does wonders for your focus, concentration, attention to detail, and, consequently, how much you learn and how fast.  Plus, those medias will be using actual contemporary spoken language that you would hear and use yourself if you were in-country, as opposed to some dry textbook dialogue about where the biblioteca is or how to tell the waiter that you’re allergic to shellfish, you know?

In this vein, I’ve decided to actually post some music videos (the first two will be Shakira, just because I like her and so do a LOT of other people, so there’s a good chance a decent number of people in my audience will enjoy, or at least be able to tolerate, her stuff) for you to listen to along with the Spanish lyrics and my translation and analysis of them–we’re really going to go in-depth and break everything down here, so stick around, good stuff to come.  I should note that I presume you’ve already got some basic understanding and I won’t need to define every single word (such as “ser” or “yo” or “ir”) and explain every bit of grammar, though  I will address words I think are a bit outside the basic/intermediate level.  Let’s get started.

Ground Rules

1. I will post the video below this. The way I want you to do this is to play it once all the way through, then let’s look at it and analyze it one verse at a time.  Below the video will be the Spanish lyrics so that you can listen to the music video while following along with the lyrics–this is the intermediate step after you learn what the lyrics mean but before you can just listen to the song and understand everything without the lyrics to read.  Having the actual Spanish being spoken in front of you in written form so you can follow along with the audio allows you to attune your listening comprehension, it’s that intermediate step that gets you to the point where you can understand everything being said without the lyrics to read, they’re sort of like training wheels (thanks to Eiteacher for this suggestion).

2. Under the lyrics will be my translation and analysis of what was said, here is where you’ll actually learn the Spanish that was spoken during the song.  I will post the Spanish lyrics and then the English translation of them.  Use the English lyrics and SpanishDict (I highly recommend you have this open in another tab while you’re doing this) to determine the definition of any words you don’t know (I will cover a lot of the words used, but not all of them)–if the regular definition of a particular word isn’t being used or the word is being used in such a way that simply knowing its definition won’t help you, I will explain it.

3. Next I will pick out various aspects of the Spanish that she’s using that I think require an explanation–I will not cover simple things like the definition of words like “el” (which means “the”), “ser” (which means “to be”), etc. unless there is something about the way they’re being used that I think warrants explanation.  If you don’t understand what a word means, like I said, just check the English translation and/or SpanishDict.  I will link to a lot of external sites with explanations for the grammar used, or the conjugation of a verb used, or the definition of a word–I’m doing this because I don’t have the space here to explain every single detail of what’s going on, there’s an enormous amount of Spanish being used in a single song like this which is precisely why I advocate this method (this is essentially The Telenovela Method, FYI), because you can learn so much from a single song or movie or book, etc.  If you don’t understand a grammatical term that I use and it’s a link, click it!

4. Now, go back and play the verse we just analyzed several times and see if you can hear and understand everything being said, then go on to the next one.

5. If you are confused about anything and feel there’s something I didn’t cover or explain but should have, please let me know in the comments.  As a matter of fact, please leave a comment and let me know what you think regardless, I need feedback and love getting it, each individual comment allows me to make an improvement or fix a problem thereby making this blog just a little bit better each and every time I get feedback of some sort.  Oh, and you can also contact me via my contact form (this will go to my e-mail inbox).

The Video

The Lyrics

[Sanz:]
Ay payita mia, guardate la poesia
Guardate la alegria pa’ti[Shakira:]
No pido que todos los días sean de sol
No pido que todos los viernes sean de fiesta
Tampoco te pido que vuelvas rogando perdón
Si lloras con los ojos secos
Y hablando de ellaAy amor me duele tanto[Shakira:]
Que te fueras sin decir a dónde
Ay amor fue una tortura…
Perderte[Sanz:]
Yo sé que no he sido un santo
Pero lo puedo arreglar, amor[Shakira:]
No sólo de pan vive el hombre
Y no de excusas vivo yo[Sanz:]
Sólo de errores se aprende
Y hoy sé que es tuyo mi corazón[Shakira:]
Mejor te guardas todo eso
A otro perro con ese hueso
Y nos decimos adios[Shakira:]
No puedo pedir que el invierno perdone a un rosal
No puedo pedir a los olmos que entreguen peras
No puedo pedirle lo eterno a un simple mortal
Y andar arrojando a los cerdos miles de perlas[Sanz:]
Ay amor me duele tanto, me duele tanto
Que no creas más en mis promesas[Shakira:]
Ay amor[Sanz:]
Es una tortura[Shakira:]
Perderte[Sanz:]
Yo sé que no he sido un santo
Pero lo puedo arreglar, amor[Shakira:]
No sólo de pan vive el hombre
Y no de excusas vivo yo[Sanz:]
Sólo de errores se aprende
Y hoy sé que es tuyo mi corazón[Shakira:]
Mejor te guardas todo eso
A otro perro con ese hueso
Y nos decimos adios[Sanz:]
No te vayas, no te vayas
Oye negrita mira, no te rajes
De lunes a viernes tienes mi amor
Déjame el sábado a mi que es mejor
Oye mi negra no me castigues más
Porque allá afuera sin ti no tengo paz
Yo solo soy un hombre muy arrepentido
Soy como la ave que vuelve a su nidoYo se que no he sido un santo
Es que no estoy hecho de carton[Shakira:]
No solo de pan vive el hombre
Y no de excusas vivo yo.[Sanz:]
Solo de errores se aprende
Y hoy se que es tuyo mi corazón[Shakira:]
AAaaay… AAaaay… AAaaay… Ay Ay
Ay todo lo que he hecho por tí
Fue una tortura perderte
Me duele tanto que sea asíSigue llorando perdón
Yo ya no voy a llorar… por tí

Translation and Analysis

“La Tortura”, as you have likely guessed, means “The Torture”.  This is a video about the relationship between two former lovers–the man, in this case Alejandro Sanz, has cheated on her (Shakira) and he wants to come back.  She really, really, reeeaaalllly likes him and has a hard time saying “no”, but has learned her lesson and “no” it is, finally.

Here’s the first verse:

[Sanz:]

Ay payita mia, guardate la poesia
Guardate la alegria pa’ti

Lot’s going on here.  Ok, “payo / paya” is a Peninsular Spanish (i.e. Spanish from Spain, aka “Iberian Spanish”) slang term that means “a non-gypsy person” – lol wtf, right?  Gypsies are still a very persistent problem in Europe, and recently got a lot of news attention thanks to France’s President Sarkozy, so payita is an affectionate term of endearment in this case – as you probably already know adding “ito / ita” to the end of any noun makes it “little”, so in this case “payita mia” translates to “my little non-gypsy”.  Because some of you are probably wondering, the word for “gypsy” in Spanish is “gitano / gitana”.  “Guardar” means to guard, keep, or save, “poesia” means poetry, “alegria” means happiness, and the end where he says “pa’ti” is just a sort of slang or informal contraction of “por ti”, sort of like “don’t” is to “do not”.

So, what we get is:

Ay, my little non-gypsy, save the poetry for yourself
Save the happiness for yourself

Next stanza…

[Shakira:]

No pido que todos los días sean de sol
No pido que todos los viernes sean de fiesta
Tampoco te pido que vuelvas rogando perdón
Si lloras con los ojos secos
Y hablando de ella

Ay amor me duele tanto

Which translates to:

I’m not asking that every day be sunny
I’m not asking that there be a party every Friday
Nor do I ask you to come back begging forgiveness
If you cry with dry eyes,
Speaking about her

Oh my love, it hurts so much

You’ll notice the use of the subjunctive a couple times there (“sean”), which I can’t possibly explain here without making this post even more ridiculously long than it already is, plus I’ve written up an entire article on the subjunctive that does an excellent job of explaining it and includes tons of examples, so if you’re not already familiar with it I would direct you there: The Spanish Subjunctive Explained.

“Tampoco” can be kind of funny, it can literally translate in English to “either” OR “neither”, it can be either one depending on the context, but regardless it always results in the sentence being negative.  You could say “Yo tampoco” which would mean “Me neither“, or you could say “Yo no voy tampoco” which would mean “I’m not going either” – see?

“Volver” means to turn around or return and “rogar” means “to beg”, so “vuelves rogando perdón” means to return while begging forgiveness. “Doler” means to hurt, so “me duele tanto” (which you’ll hear repeatedly throughout the song) means “It hurts me so much”.

Alright, next one:

[Shakira:]

Que te fueras sin decir a dónde
Ay amor fue una tortura…
Perderte

Which translates to:

That you left without saying to where
Ay my love, it was a torture…
To lose you

She’s using the past subjunctive form of irse to say “you left” (“te fueras”), the preterite of ser (“fue”) to say “it was” (remember, the preterite conjugation of “ser” and “ir” are identical: you have to determine which it is via the context), and “perder”, as you likely know, means “to lose” – tack “te” on the end and you’ve got “to lose you”.  Done. Simple. Next.

[Sanz:]

Yo sé que no he sido un santo
Pero lo puedo arreglar, amor

Which means:

I know I haven’t been a saint
But I can fix it, love

“Sé” is just the regular present “yo” form of “saber” (“to know”), then “no he sido” uses the participle of “ser” which is “sido” along with the yo form of “haber” to create “I haven’t been”.  “Santo” means saint, and that’s pretty much it.

Next stanza:

[Shakira:]

No sólo de pan vive el hombre
Y no de excusas vivo yo

Ah…ha ha, now she’s starting to call him on his bullshit, I love this line, it’s very witty and to the point:

Not only on bread does man live
And I don’t live on excuses

In this case “man” is presented as “el hombre” which literally translates as “the man”, which makes it extremely clear that she’s using the universal “Man”, as in all humanity, all people, not just those of the male sex, just to be clear.

Next stanza:

[Sanz:]

Sólo de errores se aprende
Y hoy sé que es tuyo mi corazón

Which translates to:

Only from errors do we learn
And today I know my heart is yours

In this case you’re seeing “se apprende” used in a general manner not referring to anyone in particular, which you’ll see a lot, it just means “one [does this action]” or “[this action] is done”, as in “se habla español” means “Spanish spoken here” or “no se hace eso” means “one does not do that” or “that’s not done”.  Here “se apprende” means “it is learned” or “one learns”, does that make sense?  Literally it would translate as “Only from errors does one learn”, but that…doesn’t sound as good and doesn’t make as much sense – remember, translations are contextual, they convey meaning, as opposed to the literal definition of each word.

Also, for clarification, I was a bit confused by these lyrics initially and thought that when he said “hoy sé que es tuyo mi corazón”, he was saying “today I know it’s yours, my love” but he was actually saying “today I know my heart is yours” – the confusion comes from a combination of the fact that the word order is a little screwy with the object of the sentence being at the very end along with the fact that “corazón” can mean either “love” or “heart” depending on the context (and if you see “mi corazón” you would immediately think it means “my love”), and either would appear to work there depending on how you do the word order.

Next one:

[Shakira:]
Mejor te guardas todo eso
A otro perro con ese hueso
Y nos decimos adios

This one she says very fast and you’re going to have to really concentrate and probably replay it a few times to catch it; what it means is:

Better save all that for yourself
To another dog with that bone [Take that bone to some other dog]
And let’s say goodbye

Because she uses “te guardas” instead of just “guardas” that makes it reflexive, which means that the verb in question (guardar) applies to the preceding reflexive pronoun (“te” in this case), so in saying “te guardas” she’s saying he should keep it to himself (because “guardas” is being applied to “te”, which means “you”).  You see the same thing at the end with “nos decimos adios”, in that case “decimos” is being applied to “nos”, themselves–that’s who they’re saying goodbye to.

Next stanza:

[Shakira:]
No puedo pedir que el invierno perdone a un rosal
No puedo pedir a los olmos que entreguen peras
No puedo pedirle lo eterno a un simple mortal
Y andar arrojando a los cerdos miles de perlas

Which translates into:

I can’t ask winter to spare a rose bush
I can’t ask an elm tree to produce pears
I can’t ask that which is eternal from a mere mortal
And go casting thousands of pearls before swine

“Perdonar” simply means to pardon or excuse (“Perdone” is the most common way of saying “excuse me”) so it makes perfect sense that in this context it translates to “spare”.  “Entreguen” is the present form of “entregar”, which literally means “to hand over, deliver, or turn in” and is how you would express a plant producing or bearing fruit in Spanish, you say that the plant “turns over” its fruit, make sense?

Now, we get to “lo eterno a un simple mortal”…ok, what’s happening here is that “lo” is a neuter article used in a way in Spanish that’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s sort of like how we use “that” in a very specific context: “that which is”.  That’s the best possible translation I can make out of the use of “lo _____”, it means “that which is ______”, so “lo eterno” (“eterno” is an adjective that means “eternal”) means “that which is eternal”. Also, “simple” literally translates to, as you might have already guessed, “simple” but can also mean “mere” (see here and look at the 4th definition) and that’s precisely what it does in this context.

“Andar” has a primary definition that means “to walk”, but can also be used in all sorts of other different ways.  In this case it simply means “to go about”, as in “to go about doing something”.  A better primary definition instead of “to walk” might be “to go”, as you can say “Ando a la casa” means “I’m going to the house” but you can also say “Las cosas andan mal” which means “Things are going badly”–see?  Now, the next word you see after “andar” is “arrojando”, which is the “-ing” form (properly called the “gerund”) of “arrojar” which means “to throw or hurl”. “miles” is the plural of “mil” which means “thousand”, “cerdo” means “pig”, and “perlas” is “pearls”.

Right, next!

[Sanz:]
Ay amor me duele tanto, me duele tanto
Que no creas más en mis promesas

Translates to:

Ay my love it hurts so much, it hurts so much
That you no longer trust my promises

Pretty straightforward: we’ve already covered “doler” and “me duele tanto”, “creas” is the present subjunctive “tu” form of “creer” which means “to believe”, and “promesas” is “promises”. Done.

Next:

[Shakira:]
Ay amor

[Sanz:]
Es una tortura

[Shakira:]
Perderte

Already covered this, shouldn’t be any confusion here. Next:

[Sanz:]
Yo sé que no he sido un santo
Pero lo puedo arreglar, amor

[Shakira:]
No sólo de pan vive el hombre
Y no de excusas vivo yo

[Sanz:]
Sólo de errores se aprende
Y hoy sé que es tuyo mi corazón

[Shakira:]
Mejor te guardas todo eso
A otro perro con ese hueso
Y nos decimos adios

Again, this is just a repeat of a previous verse. Next.

[Sanz:]
No te vayas, no te vayas
Oye negrita mira, no te rajes
De lunes a viernes tienes mi amor
Déjame el sábado a mi que es mejor
Oye mi negra no me castigues más
Porque allá afuera sin ti no tengo paz
Yo solo soy un hombre muy arrepentido
Soy como la ave que vuelve a su nido

Yo se que no he sido un santo
Es que no estoy hecho de carton

Holy crap.  This one’s going to take a while. Ok.  First, here’s the translation and then we’ll go back and analyze it bit-by-bit:

Don’t go, don’t go
Listen, baby, don’t run away
From Monday to Friday you have my love
Leave Saturday to me, it’s better that way
Listen baby, don’t punish me anymore
Because, out there, without you I have no peace
I’m just a very repentant man
I’m like the bird that returns to its nest

I know I haven’t been a saint
It’s that I’m not made of cardboard

The first thing that might confuse you is the word “negrita” and…oh boy, this word.  This is one of the funniest and most difficult words in the Spanish language to explain to English speakers.  Let me just first say that it’s a very common term of endearment that’s roughly equivalent to our “baby” or “sweetie”–that’s what it means and that’s all it means.  It does not have any kind of racial connotation.  That said, the word for “black” in Spanish is “negro”, which is what this word is derived from, and means something sort of like “my little blackie” (but minus the racial connotation that would obviously have in English) and what it literally translates to is…brace yourself…”my little negro”. I swear I’m not jerking your chain.  Here, straight from Wikipedia:

However, in Spanish-speaking countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay where there are few people of African origin and appearance, negro (negra for females) is commonly used to refer to partners, close friends^[9] or people in general independent of skin color…Negrito has come to be used to refer to a person of any ethnicity or color, and also can have a sentimental or romantic connotation similar to “sweetheart,” or “dear” in English…

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro#In_other_languages

It’s just a term of endearment, and despite what it literally means, it doesn’t have any kind of racial connotation–you could very well see a couple in Colombia or Argentina with white skin and blond hair referring to each other as “mi negrito” and “mi negrita”, no big deal. Ok, moving on…

The next thing he says is “no te rajes”.  “Rajar” is a verb that literally means “to crack or slice”, however it’s also used as a slang word meaning many different things, one of which is “to fail, give up, or run away”, which is what it means here.  After that he says,

De lunes a viernes tienes mi amor
Déjame el sábado a mi que es mejor

This is such a fun song, you get a bit of insight into the Latin American culture as well as learning the language.  He says that she has his love from Monday to Friday, but that it would be best if she let him have Saturday as “his day”, or as a sort of day off–meaning that he’s faithful to her 6 out of 7 days a week and that ought to be enough for her, she should let him go screw around on Saturday because it’ll be good for their relationship.  This is a very common aspect of their culture: in many places the men are expected to cheat, to sleep around, they’re not considered “men” if they don’t, and the women are expected to tolerate it.  It’s part of the “machismo” culture.  The general feeling seems to be that as long as he’s a good boyfriend/husband the rest of the time and takes care of his woman/family, and he’s discreet about it, then there’s nothing wrong with him having a mistress or two and occasionally taking some time off to go mess around with them.  That’s just how men are, and that’s that.  So it’s not surprising at all, to me, to see these sort of lyrics in a Spanish song.

After that we encounter the words “castigues”, which is the imperative (command) form of “castigar” which means “to punish”, and “arrepentido”, which is an adjective that means “repentant”.

And in the next line we encounter more of the same as above:

Soy como la ave que vuelve a su nido

“Ave” means “bird”, “vuelve” is from the verb “volver” which means “to return”, and “nido” is “nest”.  He’s like the bird that returns to its nest: she’s his nest, and although he may occasionally stray, he’ll always come back to his home, lol 😀

Now, after that you’ll see, in the last line, “no estoy hecho de carton” which literally translates to “I’m not made of cardboard”, but this is not the contextual translation, this is how Spanish-speakers say “I’m not made of stone”, it’s their equivalent expression that simply means “I’m not emotionless”, it means the same thing, even though the word they use is “carton” which means “cardboard” instead of “stone”.

Alright, finally, we’re almost done, here’s the very last part:

[Shakira:]
No solo de pan vive el hombre
Y no de excusas vivo yo.

[Sanz:]
Solo de errores se aprende
Y hoy se que es tuyo mi corazón

[Shakira:]
AAaaay… AAaaay… AAaaay… Ay Ay
Ay todo lo que he hecho por tí
Fue una tortura perderte
Me duele tanto que sea así

Sigue llorando perdón
Yo ya no voy a llorar… por tí

Which translates to:

Man doesn’t live on bread alone
And I don’t live on excuses

Only from errors do we learn
And today I know my heart is yours

Ay, all that I’ve done for you
It was a torture to lose you
It hurts me so that it’s like this
Keep on crying sorry
I…
I’m not going cry for you anymore

Alright, so we’ve got some previous verses repeated and then we get to: “todo lo que he hecho por tí”, which means “all that I’ve done for you”.  Here you’re seeing, again, the use of the neuter term “lo” in the form of “lo que” which, as we’ve already learned, means “that which” or “that which is”.  In this case in functions, with the “yo” form of haber (“he”), to mean “that which I have”.  Then you’ve got “hecho” which is the past participle of “hacer” (“to do”), so you get “that which I’ve done”.

Also, you’ll see some stuff you’ve already seen (“me duele tanto perderte”, which you know means “it hurt so much to lose you”), and then you see “sea así”.  “Sea” is the subjunctive of “ser” and is used in this case because it’s an expression of emotion.  “Así” means “so” or “this way” or “in this manner”.  “Sigue” is the imperative of “seguir” which means “to continue”, “llorando” is the gerund of “llorar”, so she’s saying “continue crying ‘sorry'”.  “ya” is a funny word and literally translates to “already” or “still” and you’ll see it used a LOT in Spanish, many times where we wouldn’t used the words “already” or “still”, and if you’ll click that link that goes to the dictionary definition of it and scroll down to the 4th definition of the word, you’ll see “any more” listed as one of contexts in which “ya” can be used.

Edit (07/22/12): Please see JLA’s excellent comment here concerning the use of idioms and biblical language in this post.  I’d like to point out that some of my translations are intentionally a bit literal in order to help the learner understand how I’m getting the meaning that I am.

Well that’s that.  We’re done.  I sincerely congratulate you if you’ve managed to stay with me this long, if you needed to break up this post into a few separate learning sessions I don’t blame you, in fact I’d be shocked if you didn’t.  I highly recommend you note all new words that you’ve learned for review, my personally preferred method of this is a program called Anki (it’s an SRS: Spaced Repetition Software).  I hope that was interesting, let me know what you think in the comments (and would like me to write about in the future), also…  If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below!  Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew