A while back, a hashtag hit the trending topics on Twitter in Mexico: #quierounnovioque. I used the program Archivist to save the tweets and export them to an Excel file. I often do this if the teaching value of a particular trending topic hits me. In this case, the tweets were full of subjunctive used because […]
Popping in quickly to share an article with a lot of youth appeal (I mean, it has juventud in the article) and some subjunctive for influence. You’ll find it here on univision.com.
Past subjunctive is not the easiest thing to find in a song, much less several repetitions of it. I blogged a bit about a couple of songs that do it, but I this song just crossed my radar and wow, what a gem for past subjunctive. It has 17 verbs in the past subjunctive, 8 […]
The word ojalá finds its roots in Arabic, meaning “May allah grant that.” In Spanish it’s always followed by subjunctive, and here are two songs to help work with that. The first is with present, Ojalá que llueva café, by Juan Luis Guerra. It’s one of those songs that can lead you in a hundred different […]
Subjunctive by reason of indefinite or negative antecedent… doesn’t that sound fun? This is my story for this reason of subjunctive. We do this in the spring semester of Spanish 2. Our principal wakes up in the morning and goes to school. He asks the woman at the front desk, “I’m looking for the student […]
Hey, my title rhymes. 😀 Luis Fonsi has a new(ish) song out that actually hit the Billboard Top 100. It’s kind of slow but very catchy. The song is called No Me Doy Por Vencido, and incidentally the video is pretty good too (and 100% legal, yay!). In one part in the chorus, the verb […]
One of my problems with standard curriculum is they can’t provide enough variety in activities focused on one issue. They try, I’ll give the writers credit for that, but there are only so many textbook/workbook exercises you can design to elicit subjunctive for doubt. And really, do we believe that those cheesy textbook videos offer […]
There’s a really odd technopop group out of Argentina that became somewhat a suprise hit in the last two years. The band is called Miranda! and I use one of their songs–once a year only in Spanish 2 and 3–for ‘we’ commands. I really don’t like technopop, and this song gets on my nerves like […]
There’s another song that’s great for so many reasons–by far one of my students’ favorites: La llave de mi corazón by Juan Luis Guerra. His music and lyrics are positive and upbeat and the codeswitching (mixing languages) fascinates my students, who often enter my class thinking bilingualism is weird and there aren’t any cool people […]
Someone landed on my blog a little while ago by searching for good subjunctive songs, so I thought I’d post a couple more I’ve run across. One is the song “Todo Cambió,” the title track to Camila’s debut CD. That’s them in the photo. The subjunctive is following the word antes for something in the […]
I just got this new song, La frase tonta de la semana, by the group La 5a Estación. The woman in the middle does pretty much all the vocals, and the guys play the guitar. The video is pretty good, though not the most interesting in the world. (She likes to change outfits a lot […]