PARA TU AMOR

Those who endure, conquer.
- Anonymous

Today is day 1 of my attempt to conquer Spanish. That's right Spanish, I'm coming for you. Arrrrrr.

Music is a great way to learn. Thanks to the musical School House Rock, I can still sing the preamble to the Constitution oh so many years after learning it. And whenever someone tells me they have a terrible memory, I work them around to the fact they probably know hundreds of song lyrics. Bad memory? I don’t think so.

Anyway for learning a foreign language, some people will tell you to begin with children’s songs. That is probably a good idea. Unfortunately they are annoying – the songs not the people giving advice. I just couldn’t find songs I enjoyed or could tolerate long enough. Learning should be enjoyable. Barney is not enjoyable. The Spanish equivalent even less so.

To find a song to begin with I made a general list of requirements:

• A song I liked
• Clear lyrics
• Some words/phrases that I didn’t know
• Useable words/phrases
• Not too advanced or difficult

Then I started my search. As part of my fauxmersion plan, I’ve been looking for Spanish radio stations for when I begin. Checking out one (search Mana) on Pandora I heard a song by Juanes that I enjoyed. So I went on YouTube and checked out a few of his songs before finally settling on Para Tu Amor. I chose this one as it seemed simple enough (a good amount of repetition of words) yet chock full of words I didn’t know. Plus I liked it.

Obviously just listening to Spanish isn’t enough to learn Spanish. Although it would be amazing if it did. But it doesn’t. So now I need to bring on the work I need to do with this song. First, I figure I’d get used to the song by listening to it a few times. Perhaps even singing along a bit. I found a YouTube version with the lyrics just for this.

Para Tu Amor by Juanes

Then I looked for the translated version. Found this. You have to be careful as not all translations are created equal so some translations may contain some errors. Adjust them as needed. I used SpanishDict to work on some of the words and figure out which words were which.

This allowed me to create some flashcards with words and phrases from the song. I made about 28 cards with a few just containing a word or two but most containing longer phrases. Knowing that sleeping after learning something new increases retention, I'll work with the flashcards right before I go to bed.

I also found a site, Lyrics Training, which has this song and allows you to try to fill in the lyrics as the song plays. That should help with learning the song in Spanish so I'll be working on that this afternoon.

My overall goal with the song, is to learn it in Spanish and be able to translate it into English. This will teach me some vocabulary and help with pronunciation. All of this in a way that is more fun than just memorizing a list of words in Spanish. But this will still require me to put in some effort today. Because tomorrow I move onto something else.