YouTube
June 19, 2009
Aquí Estoy Yo: video oficial
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The fabulous group of guys I wrote about two posts down has their official music video out: Aquí Estoy Yo on universalmusicgroup’s YouTube channel Add to that Universal’s “behind the scenes” video including interviews and you’ve got a solid class’s worth of material. All the guys are from different countries and their accents show it […]
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June 19, 2009
A new group on my radar
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Yesterday I was watching the Today Show (while feeding Zoe, our morning ritual) and caught a segment on a group I never heard of but who apparently won a grammy. They’re called Ozomatli and they sing a lot in English, some in Spanglish, and some in Spanish. I found this song on YouTube: La Gallina […]
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April 6, 2009
As I wrote in this post, No Me Doy por Vencido by Luis Fonsi is a recent favorite of mine, and Fonsi himself is quickly climbing my list of faves, particularly because of how much he loves his wife and is devoted to her, and refuses to fall into the seductive/hunter/lust-after-these-other-bellezas trap often laid for […]
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April 6, 2009
In Spanish 3 these days we’re looking at the por/para contrasts and for this I like to use two songs that nicely illustrate this unique difference. The first is Solo por ti by Josh Groban. Yes, some students won’t like it because he is a classical singer, but it’s a beautiful song. Incidentally, also an […]
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March 22, 2009
Negative commands + culture
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Here’s a short videoclip of Hugo Chávez continuing his usual rhetoric, now against President Obama, lest anyone think there would be any change in his behavior. It’s no secret in my classes that I’m no fan of Chávez (or Obama for that matter, but I digress). Fortunately he provides us with lots of fodder for […]
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March 9, 2009
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 […]
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February 18, 2009
Good stories for commands
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Here are a couple of good stories to use when teaching commands. En aquel prado is a book I actually start using the first week of Spanish 1 to practice numbers, but the best use of it is for commands. The most repetition is in uds and nosotros commands, although with the first animal there […]
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February 9, 2009
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 […]
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February 3, 2009
A correction on La Frase Tonta
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For my commentary on the song “La frase tonta de la semana,” look here. Sometimes the music videos I link to are a violation of copyright. Sorry ’bout that–I’m a real stickler for copyright law. Just ask my students how often I tell them I won’t burn music for them and I disapprove of linewire […]
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February 3, 2009
It greatly bothers me how history books, history classes, and the daily news sources largely ignore Latin America. Car bombings and such in Iraq make headline news all the time because we’re involved and that somehow makes them more important than such things that have become commonplace in Colombia because of a more than 40-year […]
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January 15, 2009
A couple more subjunctive songs
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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 […]
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December 29, 2008
Alex Campos’s YouTube channel
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Alex Campos is, it appears to me, a rising star in the contemporary Christian Spanish music scene, and behold–he has his own YouTube channel. The best thing about his videos is that they’re not all music. He’ll sometimes post a video greeting from wherever he’s doing a concert these days. Greetings always contain at least […]
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