Estoy Aquí
by Shakira
How to study this song
Learning “Estoy Aquí” means 58 entries at A2 — 22 Spanish words, 4 adjectives and 32 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Begin with años, cara and cartas: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. This one leans on its verbs: 32 distinct forms against 4 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| años | years | anni | années | anos | jaren |
| cara | face | faccia | visage |
Adjectives
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mía | mine | mia | mienne | minha | mijn |
This card holds 3 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.
Verb forms
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| estoy | I am | sono | je suis | estou | ik ben |
| sé | I know | so | je sais |
What this song teaches you
Level · A2
- Vocabulary words
- 22
- Adjectives
- 4
- Word combos
- 1
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 32
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
By the middle of 1995 Shakira was eighteen years old and, by the standards of the record industry, already a disappointment. Two albums recorded as a teenager in Colombia had come and gone without troubling anyone outside her own country, and the label was close to treating her as a project that had not worked. What changed was a decision about authorship: she sat down to write with the Colombian musician and producer Luis Fernando Ochoa and kept control of the words, the melodies and the tone. The first song released from that partnership was this one, issued as a single on 29 August 1995 and then as the opening statement of the album Pies Descalzos, which arrived on 6 October that year through Sony Music Colombia. The song is built on a very small, very recognisable situation. Someone has gone. The person left behind is still in the same rooms, surrounded by the ordinary objects a relationship leaves lying around — photographs, notebooks, letters, the accumulated evidence of a shared life — and cannot make any of it mean something different. Rather than aim for grand declarations, the lyric keeps returning to the plain fact of presence: she is still there, still attached, while time refuses to do the job of erasing anything. The genius of it, and the reason it has outlived a thousand better-produced break-up songs, is the restraint. It is a song about not having moved on, sung by someone clear-eyed enough to know it. Musically it sits where Shakira's early work always sat: Latin pop with the rhythmic push of rock, acoustic guitar under a voice that bends notes rather than merely hitting them. For anyone learning Spanish, that combination is unusually generous. The verbs are in the first person and mostly in the present, the nouns are the vocabulary of any home — day, night, face, sea, sky, city — and the phrasing is slow enough that individual words survive the melody, which is not something you can say about every hit record.
Did you know?
There are two official videos for the song, made for different markets. The one released across Latin America was directed by Simon Brand and shows Shakira on a farm in wintry light, guitar in hand, seated for much of the running time. A second version, directed by Christophe Gstalder, was cut for European and English-speaking markets and uses a remastered take of the song, with Shakira singing indoors, moving through a house. It was also the first of her songs to be promoted with a music video at all, which places it exactly at the border between the artist nobody outside Colombia had heard of and the one who would be on MTV within two years. Shakira also recorded a Portuguese version, Estou Aqui, as part of an early strategy of meeting the Brazilian market in its own language — a habit she kept up for decades and which later produced Portuguese and English versions of several of her biggest hits. The album title, Pies Descalzos, means "bare feet", and the barefoot image ran through the whole campaign: the artwork, the tour and eventually the Pies Descalzos Foundation, the education charity Shakira set up in Colombia in 1997 and still funds. The record is also the one that fixed her habit of writing her own material, a point she has made repeatedly in interviews since; every album after it carries her name in the songwriting credits.