This song is available on Spanish Músicapaedia's La Feria de Abril
 

This lesson teaches the conditional, past subjunctive, and preterit.

      These written exercises for Sirena Española are but part of the complete lesson.  The listening and speaking parts come first. Complete answer keys are provided for all lessons. Also, there is a crossword puzzle that is included with every song (not shown in this sample lesson).
      The various lessons use every conceivable means of engaging students.  These range from simple "cloze" exercises, crossword puzzles, multiple choice, matching, ranking, categorizing, searches, error recognition, and "yes/no"/"either"/"or" responses, to answering open-ended questions orally and in writing, describing, correctly ordering, identifying grammar patterns, inducing, deducing, synthesizing, applying, illustrating, dramatizing, filming, miming, singing, dancing, learning cooperatively, and creating.

Recommended vocabulary to mark while listening to the song: conditional, past subjunctive, preterit.
Recommended culminating activities: illustration, dramatic interpretation, lip sync/karaoke.

1.3.
Si me _________________
si me susurraras
si tú me dijeras a mí
que saldrías ________________
--más que amigos--
¿diría "que no" o "que sí"?

De los techos yo _________________ "¡Qué sí!"
el ___________ del alma cantaría "¡Qué sí!"
el corazón batiría "¡Qué sí!"
Quiéreme, quiéreme, quiéreme, quiéreme, oh
Te quiero
como quiere
la _______________
color
y yo te requiero
como requiere
el _______________
dolor
Yo reclamo
como reclama
el _______________
amor
y de tu corazón
soy yo
cazador

Si te ______________
si yo pudiera
si yo estuviera _______________
Dios tocaría
yo cantaría
tú ________________ conmigo

Me llamaste a mí y me espabilé
Me _________________ a mí y me enamoré
Me besaste aquí y me excité
Quiéreme, quiéreme, quiéreme, quiéreme, oh

Te quiero
como quiere
la _________________
color
y yo te requiero
como requiere
el _________________
dolor
yo reclamo
como reclama
el _________________
amor
y de tu corazón
soy yo
cazador

El Banco de Palabras:
miraste, tuviera, niño, vida, contigo, fondo,
preguntara, placer, conmigo, gritaría, bailarías

Vocabulario
A la derecha son frases o palabras en inglés, por orden de aparición en la canción.
Escriba el español a la izquierda:
___________________________If you were to ask me
___________________________if you were to whisper to me
___________________________if you were to tell me
___________________________that you would go out with me
___________________________more than friends
___________________________would I say "no" or "yes"?
___________________________from the rooftops
___________________________I would shout "yes"
___________________________the depth of my sould
___________________________would sing "yes"
___________________________my heart
___________________________would beat "yes"
___________________________want me, want me, want me
___________________________I want you like
___________________________life wants
___________________________color
___________________________I require you like
___________________________pleasure requires
___________________________pain
___________________________I demand like
___________________________the child demands
___________________________love
___________________________and of your heart
___________________________I am a hunter
___________________________If I had you
___________________________if I could
___________________________if you were with me
___________________________God would play
___________________________I would sing
___________________________you would dance with me
___________________________you called me
___________________________and I came to my senses
___________________________you looked at me
___________________________and I fell in love
___________________________you kissed me here
___________________________and I became passionate
___________________________love me, love me, love me

Sirena Española--Ejercicios.
Suggested target vocabulary to mark: VERBS: past subjunctive, conditional, and/or preterit. Recommended Culminating Activities: Mime, Illustration/Storyboard

Preguntas Orales:
1. ¿Está enamorado el cantante?

2. ¿Tiene alguna duda sobre sus sentimientos románticos?

3. ¿Se siente tímido u osado en su declaración de amor? ¿Cuál(es) línea(s) de la canción
apoya(n) tu respuesta? (What evidence is there to support your answer?)

4. Según la letra de la canción, ¿Ya le ha dicho ella al cantante si ella misma está enamorada de él?

El Subjuntivo Imperfecto y el Condicional.
These two tenses were made for each other. This is the "If I had a million dollars, I would buy me a big house" concept (for the vast majority of us, quite contrary to fact...): "Si tuviera un millón de dólares, me compraría una casa grande."

"Tuviera" is the past subjunctive, whose root form comes from the third person preterite
"tuvieron" ("tuvier-") with the endings -a, -as, -a, -amos, -ais, -an. "Compraría" is the
conditional ("would"), whose form is the infinitive ("comprar") plus -ía, -ías, -ía, -íamos,
-íais, -ían. The conditional tense (and the future tense as well) has (the same) few irregular roots: har- (hacer), dir- (decir), saldr- (salir), tendr- (tener), vendr- (venir), ....

Conjugue:
1. Si yo no_______________(estar) enfermo, yo________________ (trabajar) hoy.
2. Si ella ________________(poder), _______________(ir) a la India mañana.
3. Si nosotros _________________ (practicar) más, __________________(dominar) el español.
4. Si mis amigos ________________(venir), la fiesta _____________ (ser) más divertida.
5. Si _________________ (haber) más tiempo y recursos, yo te ________________ (ayudar).
6. Si tú me ________________ (escuchar),(tú) ____________________ (entender) lo que te
estoy diciendo.
7. Si yo _________________(oír) el despertador, ____________________ (levantarse) a tiempo.
8. Si vosotros _________________ (salir) ahora, __________________ (perder) la primera parte
del partido.
9. Si yo _____________(ser) el rey, ________________ (promulgar) leyes justas.
10. Si yo no ________________ (tener) amigos ni familia, _____________ (morirse) de soledad.

El Pretérito (regular).
El pretérito is the simple past tense, not to be confused with the imperfect (another past tense in Spanish). Used in this song, it exemplifies the "series of actions" usage, where either one act causes another, or an actor simply performs a series of simple actions one after the other, in chronological sequence.

El Pretérito se forma al eliminar las terminaciones del infinitivo (-ar, -er, -ir), y reëmplazarlas con -é, -aste, -ó, -amos, -asteis, -aron (-AR), -í, -iste, -ió, -imos, -isteis, -ieron (-ER, -IR). Las formas irregulares del tiempo se ven en las canciones "¿Por qué Me Amaste?", "Ya No Soy," y "Adiós, Mi Amor."

Escoja el verbo apropriado para cada espacio en blanco, y conjúguelo de acuerdo con el sujeto:

esperar llamar mirar besar insistir vivir asistir abrir meter comer beber

1. Concha Y Carmen___________ el autobús por cuarenta y cinco minutos.
2. Cuando yo ___________ a Marisol por teléfono, ella estaba planchando la ropa.
3,4. Cuando el sereno ________________ la llave en la cerradura, la puerta no ___________.
5. Cuando Perico me ____________ con sus labios perfumados, quería huir a Francia con él en seguida.
6. Los estudiantes _________________ en que no hubiera examen el viernes.
7. Nosotros ____________ la televisión anoche hasta las dos de la madrugada.
8,9. Primero Marta _____________ la leche, y después _______________ el almuerzo.
10. Yo _______________ en España en los '80.
11. ¿__________________(tú) a la universidad allí?

Verbos Reflexivos.
The most common reason that many verbs in Spanish are reflexive is to indicate that the action is being done by the subject to him- or herself (or -selves). Without the reflexive construction, the recipient of the verb action would still be in question, leaving the listener wondering to whom the action was directed. A perfect example would be "despertar(se)", "to wake up." If I said "(Yo) desperté a las seis de la mañana," the listener would still be wondering who was being awakened, because besides a person waking up on their own, it is possible to wake another person up (transitive verb). It's possible to use the non-reflexive, "Yo desperté a mi hijo a las seis de la mañana;" so to clarify this, the reflexive is used to remove all doubt "(Yo) me desperté," "I woke (myself) up," even though we need an alarm clock (despertador) to do that. Other verbs necessitating the reflexive for this reason are "llamarse", "lavarse", "encontrarse", etc.

Unfortunately for the Spanish language learner, there are simply a lot of verbs that seem
unnecessarily reflexive, for example "to decide" (decidirse), "to escape ("escaparse"), or
"to laugh" (reirse), among hundreds of others like them; why they exist at all in the reflexive form is a mystery. The Portuguese speakersin most casesseem to get along fine without this clunky construct; in any case, they exist in great abundance in Spanish, and the student must simply memorize them.

The way to say the reflexive is simply to insert "me", "te", "se", "nos", "os", and "se" in front of the verb conjugation, as in the following example. The subject pronouns (yo, tú, etc. are optional):

me llamo nos llamamos
te llamas os llamáis
se llama se llaman

Conjugue los verbos reflexivos, en el pretérito (me comí el coco, <Esp.> por ejemplo), en los espacios en blanco que correspondan.

enamorarse espabilarse lavarse llamarse enfadarse
escaparse despertarse cortarse prepararse
1. Anoche el criminal ___________________ de la policía.
2. Ayer _______________ el cabello (el pelo), y hoy todo el mundo se está mofando de mí.
3. Carola y yo _____________________ mucho para el examen de hoy.
4. Claudio ___________________ a las seis y media cuando oyó el despertador.
5,6. Cuando el profesor ________________, nosotros __________________ .
7. En esa obra de teatro, mi amigo _________________ Otelo.
8. Los niños ___________________ las manos antes de comer.
9. Pronto yo _______________ de ella; nos casaremos en Mayo.

Conmigo, Contigo, Con (¿Quién?)
"With me," and "with you," would normally be "con mí" and "con tí", but they in fact aren't; the "-go" got tagged onto the end in spoken speech, and it is written as one word, whereas the rest of the person/number chart is what you would normally expect: con él, con ella, con usted, con nosotros, con vosotros, con ellos, con ellas, con ustedes.

Traduzca al español:

1. My best friend spoke with me yesterday about (sobre) her job in the hospital.
______________________________________________________________________
2. I didn't go with you to the movies yesterday because I visited my aunt and uncle (plural).
_______________________________________________________________________
3. Jorge dined (cenar) with us last week (la semana pasada).
_________________________________________________________

Recursos Literarios (Literary Devices)

Anáfora (Anaphora). This is a speech or lyric device whereby the speaker repeats a grammatical structure at the beginning of a phrase, sentence, verse, or short paragraph. It may be one key word, or a phrase, that signals the new message. It is used in the song three times. Write just the first line that begins each instance of "anaphora":

1.___________________________
2.___________________________
3.___________________________ (posiblemente)

Simile.
Similes are like metaphors except they use "as" or "like" ("como").
El cantante quiere a su amada como...
1...la vida quiere__________________;
2...el placer requiere__________________; y como
3...el niño reclama _________________;

Hipérbaton (Hyperbaton). "Say(s) I," or "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown," or
"Under stones and earth grown cold lie the bones of our ancestors." What would be the
normally "correct" syntactical order of those words/How could you rewrite that sentences
to make them more "standard"?). Although syntactically (word order), Spanish is more fluid than English, generally both prefer to have declarative sentences in Subject-Predicate order, twisting on the verb axis. There are lines in the song where the subject of the sentence (which determines the conjugation of the verb) is at the end, or out of order. Below are a few lines from the song that could be re-written with the subject first; please do so:

1. _____________________________De tu corazón yo soy cazador.
2. _____________________________De los techos yo gritaría "¡Qué sí!"
3. _____________________________(Q)uiere la vida color.
4. _____________________________(R)equiere el placer (el) dolor.

Antítesis (Antithesis).
Antithesis is the juxtaposition of two contrasting words or ideas in the same line or verse.
Escriba las dos palabras contrastantes que son el único ejemplo de antítesis en la canción:

1. ______________/_________________

Metonimia (Metonymy). Metonymy is a metaphorical device whereby a concrete object is used to represent an abstract one, for example in the expression "La Cuna de la Civilización" ("The Cradle of Civilization"), where "Cuna", the concrete object, really means "Nacimiento" ("Birth"), the concept. When young men would go off to war and be killed, mothers, widows, and poets would lament the loss of "La flor y nata de una generación"/ "The flower and cream of a generation," and of course they weren't talking about a good latte or their backyard gardens. There is one example, used in the song twice, that represents an abstract concept. Escriba ambos el concreto y el abstracto de la canción y lo que significan realmente: Write both the concrete, in the song, and the abstract, that it really means:
concreto:______________ Answer: corazón, amor
abstracto:______________

Every literary work speaks from a voice (1st person, 3rd person, sometimes even 2nd person-- singular usually, but plural is possible). From which voice does this song speak?

Rodee con un círculo (Circle)
1st person singular 1st person plural
2nd person singular 2nd person plural
3rd person singular 3rd person plural

AN ANSWER KEY TO ALL EXERCISES IS PROVIDED IN THE BACK OF THE BOOK.

Spanish Songs