Ronnie Corbett- style...

A great way to boost your Spanish and your vocabulary and grammar is to think up song titles and album titles and try to put them into Spanish.
It's got lots of plus points.... you can do it anywhere as you have a healthy stock of titles up there in storage.... you can make them as easy or as hard as you like.... you can do it while you are driving, or in a meeting, or watching paint dry, and it's a nice, self-contained small but interesting "capsule-task."

By the way, album titles in general seem to be a bit more enigmatic and considerably harder to translate well.

Here's a few suggestions, categorised and sorted especially for you...and reading my selection, you will realise how truly ancient I am...

[A] Ought to be dead easy...just one word really..

Toad
Relish
Happy
Moonlight
Wow
Ironic

[B] Still one word, but rather more thought needed...

Revolver
Uninvited
Fullhouse
Lionheart
Powderfinger
Jungleland
Rudderless


[C] Adjectives and nouns..

Little Shoes
Available space
The Sensual World
Sweet thing
The littlest birds
Soft as chalk
Big Yellow taxi
Parallel Lines
Blue Horse
The ninth wave
Southern Man
Another day
Another Green World
Stupid girl
Deeper understanding
Big stripey lie
99 Red Balloons
Shooting Star

[D] noun lists ?

Something/Anything
Cram, crab, cockle, cowry
Peach plum pear
Atom Heart Mother
Rubberband Girl
Love and Theft


[E] Possession and other uses of "of"

Candy's room
The Song of Solomon
Angels of the silences
Constellation of the heart
Most of the time
Shake your hips
Me and my woman
Summer Days
Don't push your foot on the heartbrake
King of Pain
Moments of pleasure
Heart of Gold

[F] Verbs..

You learn
I was hoping
Cry a while
Hanginaround
Anna Begins
Maybe I'm amazed
There goes a tenner
Racing in the street
Rust never sleeps
Squeezing out sparks
Running up that hill
Girls just wanna have fun



[G] Imperatives

Let it loose
Stop breaking down
Ring them bells
Eat the music
Walk this way
Kick out the jams
Paint it black

[H] Trickier stuff

The Milk-eyed Mender
An end has a start
Nevermind
Underture
Here Come the warm jets
In a beautiful rambling mess
Accidentally in love
Darkness on the edge of town
It's alright ma, I'm only bleeding
Safe as Milk
Trout Mask replica
Feeling all the Saturday

Well... that'll do for a start... try it. You can also do book titles, Films, Band names ( often tricky)... anyway, have a go next time you are stuck in the snow.

As you know, I was mighty impressed with Estrella Morente (Enrique Morente's daughter) last time, and here's another song by her in a more formal setting... with ace guitarist Juan Habichuela... anybody who plays the guitar will realise what an amazing player he is... especially the way he makes it look so effortless. He's the bloke in last time's video sitting in the middle looking like a Ronnie Corbett-style retired bank clerk, knocking out those incredible flamenco riffs. Estupendo!

In his fascinating book " The New Spaniards" John Hooper writes... " the flamenco tradition offers one of those links with the world of a younger mankind in which Spain is so rich, for it is capable of generating that feeling of ecstacy whose inculcation is thought to have been the object of all early music. A flamenco singer ought not to perform until he or she has drifted into something approaching a trance - a state of suppressed emotion in which the need for expression gradually becomes so strong that it can no longer be contained."

You can see this ecstatic element in these Estrella Morente performances... and here she is performing " Soleá"



Yep... I'm thoroughly bowled over by that! ... and here are the words....from the lyricsmania site....

Lyrics to La Noche (Solea) : Estrella Morente
Por que te llamas Aurora
Que me acuesto a la raya del día
Si te llamaras Custodia
a la iglesia no saldría
Si te llamaras Custodia
a la iglesia no saldría

Te compro más camisas
Te compro más camisas
Y porque yo no he visto altares
'pa' que otro diga misa
Ni te miro ni te hablo
ni te compro más camisas

La noche del barro cayó
la noche del barro cayó

la noche del barro cayó
la noche del barro
y en vez de salí desnuda
salió 'vestia' de blanco
y en vez de salí desnuda
salió 'vestia' de gracia


(Gracias a Carmen por esta letra)
Por que te llamas Aurora
Que me acuesto a la raya del día
Si te llamaras Custodia
a la iglesia no saldría
Si te llamaras Custodia
a la iglesia no saldría

Te compro más camisas
Te compro más camisas
Y porque yo no he visto altares
'pa' que otro diga misa
Ni te miro ni te hablo
ni te compro más camisas

La noche del barro cayó
la noche del barro cayó

la noche del barro cayó
la noche del barro
y en vez de salí desnuda
salió 'vestia' de blanco
y en vez de salí desnuda
salió 'vestia' de gracia

blood cinema

Apart from the sheer nuts and bolts of learning Spanish, you might be interested in "reading around" the subject... maybe reading accounts by people who have travelled\worked in Spanish-speaking countries.... or perhaps reading about spanish literature\films\music\art ... or simply reading novels\detective stories\historical novels featuring Spain\Spanish-speaking people.

One of the pleasant things about learning Latin is the sheer abundance of stuff like that... and sometimes it is a pleasant change from the hard graft of trying to translate Virgil or Horace. There are loads of novels about ancient Rome, detective stories featuring Roman detectives ( obviously)( I recommend Lindsey Davies and her detective, Falco) , loads of writing about Latin texts, plenty of books about Roman Gods, accounts of travel through modern Greece and Rome with a historical slant... etc... you get the idea.

When I got interested in Welsh I was fascinated and encouraged by a brilliant book called Travels in an Old Tongue ( Pamela Petro). This is an account of a woman's travels all over the world speaking Welsh to Welsh people in China, Japan, Patagonia, the USA.... great stuff... and much easier than reading Welsh I can assure you.

SO...... what is there like this , but about Spanish? Well, I haven't actually got much of this sort of thing, but there are certainly plenty of books available about spanish culture, literature and films. I've put a selection of them up as photo's... most of these books are very highly rated.

Many of them are pretty expensive too... so I suggest you get them from your library... order them if necessary. This means you get to read them ,PLUS you are showing that there is a demand for Spanish books. I get Spanish stuff out when I go to the library, even if it is just to stop them saying there is no demand. Do it!!

NOW... can any of you out there recommend other books like these ?

I have also found that there is an increasing tendency for Oxfam bookshops not to display foreign-language stuff like they used to. Some keep them in the storeroom ( ask) but some just don't keep them at all. Complain!

Talking of doing it, here's something you might want to watch\tape.... at 4 a.m. in the early hours of Tue 2nd , "Talk Spanish"is on the TV ( BBC2 ) + Eurografters (Spain) straight afterwards. Well worth having.
Early the next morning ( 4am on Wednesday 2nd) they are showing Mi Vida Loca which is also well worth recording.

Here's Zoe with a rather dramatic, intense song, Luna.
There's loads of versions of this on the net, with or without words, live versions etc......



And here is a video of the words....



and, unusually, a video with the words in both Spanish and English...



now, to wind today's post up, here's a quote for you...

las personas son como polillas, buscan la luz para terminar girando alrededor de una bombella...