Learning Spanish with Shakira’s Tortura

To expand on the range of articles here on Fluent in 3 months, I will be welcoming some interesting guest posts from other language bloggers. Today's guest post is by Andrew over at How to Learn Spanish – Teach Yourself Spanish with My Help and came appropriately while I was spending time in Shakira's home country of Colombia. 

Using music and singing is an excellent means to improve your language skills so I'd recommend you analyse lyrics of other songs in your target language similarly! Now, over to Andrew… 

One of the best possible ways to learn a foreign language is to use popular media (TV shows, music, movies, etc.) in that language that you actually enjoy (very important) and/or are genuinely 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 take a popular music video (in Spanish, that's what I speak, that's my specialty) 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 decided to go with Shakira for several reasons:  

    I like her, always have. Not only do I like her music but she has this odd combination of cute and sexy, sultry, latina going on that just makes me have a huge crush on her. That, and the belly dancing…I just…oh lord.    

She's extremely popular, and with regards to La Tortura, according to Wikipedia, “La Tortura” is currently the highest-selling only-Spanish language digital track in United States at 804,000 downloads and the biggest-selling Spanish language track of the decade with sales of over 5 million copies worldwide.   

  She's Colombian and Sanz is Spanish. Colombian Spanish is known world-wide as being the most neutral and easiest to understand in the world, more so than even, yes, Iberian Spanish (Spanish from Spain) which tends to have some eccentricities you don't see anywhere else.