Mon Amour
by zzoilo & Aitana
How to study this song
Learning “Mon Amour” means 82 entries at A1 — 20 Spanish words, 7 adjectives and 55 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Work through the glossary first: sonrisa, ojos and cara are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 55 distinct forms against 7 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in six languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sonrisa | smile | sorriso | sourire | sorriso | glimlach |
| ojos | eyes | occhi | yeux |
Adjectives
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bonito | pretty, nice | carino | joli | bonito | mooi |
| loco | crazy | pazzo | fou |
Verb forms
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| voy | I am going | vado | je vais | vou | ik ga |
| da | gives | dà | donne |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1
- Vocabulary words
- 20
- Adjectives
- 7
- Word combos
- 5
- Expressions
- 8
- Verb forms
- 55
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
Mon Amour began as a bedroom recording. Zoilo Tuñón Rosa, who releases music as zzoilo, put it out himself on 30 December 2020 with no label behind it — a debut single by an unknown teenager, uploaded to the streaming services and left to find whatever audience it could. It found one slowly, over months rather than days, the way songs do when nobody is pushing them. The turn came on 25 July 2021, when Aitana — one of the biggest pop artists in Spain, a finalist on Operación Triunfo who had spent four years at the top of the Spanish charts — tweeted a line from it. The two got in touch through social media, recorded the new version in Madrid on 30 July, and Universal released the remix on 17 August. Barely three weeks separate the tweet from the release, which is unusually fast for a major label and tells you how obvious the opportunity looked. What makes the song work is smaller than its success. It is a declaration made badly, on purpose. The singer is awake at six in the morning and wants to go out into the street and shout; he thinks about the person when he goes to bed and then interrupts himself, because saying the rest out loud would spoil it. He promises to look her in the eye and not lie, then admits he will ask her out like a child would. Every grand gesture is undercut by an embarrassed one. The famous trick of the song is that he runs out of Spanish. Unable to say how much he likes her, he tries Basque, then offers Portuguese, then French, then falls back on an English word that only rhymes. It is funny, and it is also an accurate description of what it feels like to be too fond of someone to find the words — you keep reaching for another way to say the same small thing. The last verse turns domestic. He compares the feeling to the smell of coffee in the morning and says that with her he needs no money in the bank. After the Eiffel Tower and the racing cars, the song lands on something deliberately ordinary, which is where it means the most.
Did you know?
The song is sung in Spanish, but it borrows a word or a line from four other languages — and the title itself is French. That is the joke: someone so smitten that one language is not enough. For a learner this is a useful reminder that a song's title is not always in the song's language. Aitana's involvement is a good example of how Spanish pop works now. She came out of Operación Triunfo, the televised singing academy that has been launching Spanish careers since 2001, and by 2021 she had the reach to turn an independent single into a national number one simply by quoting it in public. The remix did not change the song much; it changed who heard it. The line about how the Basques would say it refers to Euskara, the language of the Basque Country and part of Navarre. It is not related to Spanish, or to any other living language — linguists have never managed to connect it to a family. Dropping it into a love song as one option among several is a small, affectionate joke about Spain being more multilingual than it is usually given credit for. The Eiffel Tower appears late, and the singer immediately calls the image a cliché before defending it. Undercutting your own romantic gesture and then keeping it anyway is a very particular tone, and it is most of why the song avoids sounding sentimental. For a first single released with no backing on the last day of a locked-down December, ending up at number one in Spain for a month and a half is an unusual trajectory.