Teaching Spanish - Informal Spanish

One topic that Spanish teachers often overlook when making lesson plans is "el español de la calle" the language as it’s used at its most colloquial levels. Text books usually don’t offer much material related to colloquial Spanish, likely because the subject is so broad that any attempt to cover it would inevitably end up incomplete.

When I first got into this business, too many years ago, there weren’t many resources out there designed to help teachers effectively teach colloquial speech in any attractive fashion. The internet barely even existed back then, and searching for fun and useful tools and prompts to bring to class could quickly turn into a toilsome task.

Songs to teach Spanish

Songs are often used to teach foreign language and there are plenty of fantastic examples of music activities you can use in the classroom. An important aspect of teaching for me has always been making sure that students not only know standard language, but that they can also go outside and understand at least a little bit of common informal language.

Finding practical examples of this type of language that you can use in class requires some creativity. For quite some time now, I’ve been using – hopefully not abusing - a mix of songs that I’ve compiled for teaching colloquial Spanish language. I must admit I’ve leaned heavily on the Argentine group Les Luthiers, comedic geniuses that load their lyrics with plays on words and double entendres. I’ve also used Joaquín Sabina songs, who I personally consider a better writer than a singer, and who in my opinion masterfully captures colloquial language.

The internet helps us overcome geographical barriers and it offers a practically limitless supply of valuable material. You’ve probably already seen the music video by the pair of Colombian brothers that make up the group Inténtalo Carito for the song with the challenging title of Qué difícil es hablar el español. If you haven’t seen it already, which I would find hard to believe, I highly recommend you go to www.intentalocarito.com or just go to youtube, where you’ll find different versions of the song with subtitles. The song is a hilarious tour of Spanish as it’s spoken in different regions of the world. This is clearly not material for beginning levels, but I think it’s perfectly appropriate for a B1 level student.

One more song to top off my music recommendations is one that’s easy to find on the internet. It’s by a Mexican singer named Paquita la del Barrio and is called Rata de dos patas. It gives examples of how to effectively insult people without using one single swear word.

Although they often say “la letra con sangre entra”, I think it’s better to avoid the suffering and I propose changing the sentence to “el español colloquial con una sonrisa no solo entra, sino que se queda”.