Spanish (page 2)

Beginners’ Spanish I (SPAN 201): Listening to Music

Student, Fall 2023

“Reflection on the Music of Spanish-speaking Artist – Camila Cabello

To engage with an aspect of Spanish-speaking culture and the Spanish language itself, I listened to several songs of Camila Cabello’s, sang in the Spanish language [1,2,3]. The three songs I listened to are called “Celia”, which is a woman’s name, “Mi Persona Favorita”, meaning “my favourite person”, and “Hasta Los Dientes”, which translates to “to the teeth” [1,2,3]. All three of these songs were accessed using YouTube and include lyrics in the videos. Camila Cabello is an American singer and actress born in the Habana del Este district of Cojímar, Havana, Cuba [4]. With her family, she moved back and forth between Havana and Mexico City, her father’s hometown, as a young girl [4]. Camila first moved to the US with her mother when she was six years old [4]. They settled in Florida, Miami, and by the time Camila reached Grade 9, she began to pursue a career in music [4]. Today, Camila Cabello is a successful, 26 year old pop, Latin, and R&B artist [4].

Something I observed while listening to Camila Cabello’s Spanish songs was the clear difference between this Latin music, and other Western styles of music. These differences extended far beyond the language being spoken. I truly felt like I was being emersed in an aspect of Latin culture while listening to these songs. I noticed that the instrumental sounds behind Camila’s voice were different than what I am used to. They involved more stringed instruments, drums, and what sounded to me like maracas. I do, however, recognize that this is one artist’s music, and this instrumental focus cannot necessarily be assumed as a similarity between all Latin music. This was definitely an interesting realization to me though! I found the Spanish spoken in these songs to be slightly more difficult to understand than other pieces of Spanish language I have listened to up to this point. I think the most difficult part about understanding the lyrics to these songs was the fast pace of the songs. The use of past tense, which we have not yet covered in class, was also challenging. For example, I found it difficult to translate phrases such as “te ví con tu ex y me quise morir” and “soñé que otros besos le has dado” because they contain verbs conjugated in the past tense such as “ví”, meaning “saw”, “quise”, meaning “I wanted”, and “soñé”, meaning “I dreamed”. The repetition of phrases helped me understand them more easily. I also found that reading along with the lyrics was extremely beneficial to my understanding because it simultaneously gave me visual and audio of the Spanish being spoken. I find that some words are easier for me to recognize by reading them than by hearing them alone. I found that with some sentences I could piece together familiar words or phrases such as “mi persona favorita”, “bonita”, “quien canta”, “niño”, and “me gustan”, which mean “my favourite person”, “pretty”, “who sings”, “boy”, and “I like them”. Overall, I found that I could grasp the basic meaning of most lines in the songs because the overall structure, the connecting words, and some of the verbs were familiar to me. However, I did observe that there were quite a few vocabulary words that I did not know, and the pace of “Celia” and “Hasta Los Dientes” were a bit fast for my level of understanding. I was particularly familiar with the phrase “mi persona favorita” because we just recently did an activity in a SPAN 201 lecture in which we were to discuss our favourite colours by beginning the sentence with “mi color favorito”. Because the structures of these lines are very similar, it made understanding the whole “Mi Persona Favorita” song much easier. Of course, the nouns used are different, as is the gender of the word favourite, based on these nouns. The basic idea is paralleled though, allowing me to draw a connection between this Spanish song by Camila Cabello and our class material.

References Cited

Camila Cabello – Celia (Spanish & English Lyrics). 2022 [cited 2023 Nov 10]. Available

from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py8412LiCiY

Alejandro Sanz, Camila Cabello – Mi Persona Favorita (Letra / Lyrics). 2019 [cited 2023

Nov 10]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufCY-yYs0CY

Camila Cabello, Maria Becerra – Hasta Los Dientes (Official Lyric Video) ft. Maria

Becerra. 2022 [cited 2023 Nov 10]. Available from: https://youtu.be/wIU3rQMIzLI

Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, October 28). Camila Cabello. Wikipedia.”