La Música de Miércoles (MM): Dai Dai
So here’s Dai Dai in (mostly) Spanish! It’s a YouTube Video: Dai Dai
It’s become a World Cup (Copa Mundial) tradition for Shakira to perform and release a World Cup song. This year was no exception. Because of FIFA restrictions, I can’t feed the video through to you onto this page, but as World Cup fever is upon us, it would be rude not to focus there really! (Plus the song I originally used turned out to have words that were going to get the website dinged.)
The version on the link above is the one you need to ‘get’ the notes on this MM.
(Music video by SHAKIRA FT. BURNA BOY - DAI DAI (SPANISH VERSION) (Official Video) | FIFA World Cup 2026 Song unreleased.)
A clue to my original song choice that got dropped at the last minute. (AI generated image) Comments are on if you want to guess.
I’m kind of kicking myself that my ‘Charla’ this week is on ‘comprando’ (buying’) when we could have had a World Cup chat. Well you could have - I know nothing much about football!
Regrets aside, the video linked to above is in Spanish, and I suggest that whatever level of Spanish you are, you listen through before you do anything else. You don’t have to understand it all - by listening you’re getting some of the rythm of the Spanish, and I guarantee you’ll pick out some of the words, if only because a few are in English!
Simply attuning yourself to listen is a great exercise. If you’re really stuck and want to translate rather than just let it all sink in, there are plenty of copies of the video on YouTube in both languages.
My suggestion is that you :
listen to it. No words or script first time around. Several times if you can, as each time you’ll pick up a little more.
turn on the transcription feature on YouTube (instructions below). Listen and read simultaneously. Don’t panic if you can’t understand it all. Relax and enjoy. Each time you listen like this, you’ll find a few more Spanish words that you are unsure of. If you can write them down, go and look them up. (Phones. Dictionaries. Words aren’t a problem to find these days. Except the made up ones of course!)
That’s it for this week.
Listen. Just listen.
Voseo
Note the use of ‘vos’ instead of tu, which is common in some Latin American countries (something that’s referred to by linguists as ‘voseo’). The way it’s conjugated (verb endings) changes regionally, so I won’t cover the verb endings here.
In Colombia, from where Shakira hails, the ‘vos’ is a replacement for ‘tu’, used for friends, with ‘tu’ being it’s more formal partner.(In Spain, tu is more casual, with ‘usted’ the more formal ‘you’.)
Dai Dai
OK, I’ve given you the Spanish version, but hidden in there are a few other languages, including Dai Dai itself:
Dai, dai - come on, come on (Italian)
Ikó - let’s go (Japanese)
Allez - go on (French)
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you can spot the English yourself!!
Transcription
To get the words up in Spanish on the screen, use the bar below the video.
What the bar you’re looking for looks like. On my screen it appears below videos to the right.
The second icon from the left, the square white block, is the one you need. press it and the words will magically appear on the screen.
(I love technology that works!)
As a teenager I translated Michael Jackson’s Thriller into French. Took hours of listening. Now we have transcripts in real time. If you’ve ever read transcripts in English, you’ll be aware that they’re not perfect - even on the news - but they’re damned good. On my screen, for example, the transcript gives ‘alle’ rather than the French ‘allez’ (Go!). So don’t let it stress you and don’t put stress on yourself to understand everything. The exercise is mostly familiarisation.
More advanced speakers could maybe have a try at translating it themselves - listen, write in Spanish, translate. This song is fairly slow for a Latin beat, and Shakira’s pronunciation is very clear.
Enjoy!!
This is just a bit of fun. I love and listen to, a lot of Spanish and Latin American music. This is just an extra tool in our learning journey. When we are little, we learn through songs (Wheels on the bus anyone?)
If you find it too hard, move on. Like most songs, there’s some poetic license in sentence formation. I encourage you to listen and enjoy. I take my hat off to you if you listen to every word in English songs, catch it all and know exactly what they mean. So chill. It’s about familiarity as much as about the vocabulary. An unpressured chance to test your own understanding, and learn some vocabulary.
I’m not a big football fan, but took my youngest son once to see Barcelona v Madrid at Camp Nou in Barcelona. It’s a massive stadium and the atmosphere was electric. On one team, I give you Messi. Argentinian. Fast, athletic, makes the ball move. On the other Ronaldo. Portuguese. Plays ballet with the ball, making it gracefully go where he wants. It was the first time I’d been to a World class football match. It was the moment I understood people’s passion for “The beautiful game.”
By putting this video on this month’s MM, I felt I had a double chance of there being something you might enjoy - music and football. It’s a moment in time, and at time of writing England’s team is doing rather well, now into the quarter finals.
And, as one of the comments on this video noted: Shakira como siempre: espectacular, buenísima, vibra.
Hold onto any passion the video inspires, because Spanish is, in my opinion, a hot, passionate language. And we can all enjoy a little of that in our lives!
