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A2+

Hips Don't Lie

Shakira

Language
English
Released
2006
Genre
pop latino
Level
A2+
Difficulty score
631
Duration
3:38

How to study this song

The card for “Hips Don't Lie” is built from 83 study entries at A2+: 40 English words, 15 adjectives and 28 verb forms. The glossary is the place to begin — attraction, tension and body are the song’s keywords. It is unusually descriptive — 15 adjectives alongside 40 everyday words — so expect colour rather than plot. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.

The words of this song, in several 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

ENESITFRPTNLDE
attractionatracciónattrazioneattiranceatraçãoaantrekkingAnziehung
tensiontensióntensionetensiontensãospanningSpannung
bodycuerpocorpocorpscorpolichaamKörper
boychicoragazzogarçonrapaz

What this song teaches you

Level · A2+

Vocabulary words
40
Adjectives
15
Word combos
10
Expressions
13
Verb forms
28
Quiz questions
35

More English songs at this level

  • Keep the Faith — Bon Jovi (1992)A2
  • Uptown Funk — Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars (2014)A2
  • Zombie — The Cranberries (1994)A2-
  • Flowers — Miley Cyrus (2023)A2-

Background

About the song

This is the record that turned a Colombian star into a global one, and it very nearly did not exist. By late 2005 Shakira had released Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, the English-language half of a two-album project, and it was underperforming. The label wanted another single.

What they got was a rework of something Wyclef Jean had already put out: his 2004 track Dance Like This, built around a descending brass figure and a vocal hook that had never found the audience it deserved.

Shakira and Jean rebuilt it from the ground up, kept the hook and the horns, added her verses and his rap, and released it on 28 February 2006 through Epic as the lead single of the album's reissue.

The song works because it is about one small, very human observation: the body gives you away. You can keep your face polite and your words careful, but the way you move on a dance floor announces what you actually feel, and everyone in the room can read it.

Around that idea the track assembles a party — a crowded club, a man losing an argument with his own self-control, a woman who knows exactly what she is doing, and a rapper narrating from the side of the room.

It is also, quietly, a song about where people come from. Shakira names Barranquilla, the Caribbean port city on Colombia's north coast where she grew up, and Wyclef Jean answers with the Haitian and Colombian diaspora he came out of.

The boast is not just about dancing; it is about two immigrant traditions meeting on a pop record and outselling everything else that year.

For a learner, this is an unusually rich card. The English is conversational and fast, full of contractions and reductions — the kind of speech textbooks avoid and real life is made of.

Between the Spanish phrases scattered through it, the card teaches a generous, idiom-heavy slice of spoken English with a rhythm that makes it stick.

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jongen
Junge
girlchicaragazzafilleraparigameisjeMädchen
manhombreuomohommehomemmanMann

This card holds 34 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

ENESITFRPTNLDE
wisesabiosaggiosagesábiowijsweise
sexysexysexysexysexysexysexy
crazylocopazzofouloucogekverrückt

This card holds 12 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

ENESITFRPTNLDE
fightingpeleandolitigandose battanta brigarvechtendstreitend
i'mestoysonoje suisestouik benich bin
don'tnononne pasnãonietnicht
it'sesèc'estéhet ises ist
let'svamos afacciamoallonsvamoslaten welass uns

This card holds 23 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

Did you know?

The brass figure that opens the track is not original to it. It comes from Amores Como el Nuestro, the salsa standard written by Panamanian songwriter Omar Alfanno and recorded by Puerto Rican singer Jerry Rivera — which is why Alfanno carries a writing credit on a Shakira single he had nothing to do with.

Wyclef Jean had sampled it first for Dance Like This in 2004; Hips Don't Lie inherited both the sample and the hook, with nearly everything else re-recorded.

The video was directed by the British filmmaker Sophie Muller, a long-time collaborator of Annie Lennox and Gwen Stefani, and shot in Los Angeles rather than anywhere in the Caribbean the song evokes.

There is a second, separate version: the one recorded for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, usually listed as the Bamboo version, which Shakira performed at the closing ceremony in Berlin.

It swaps parts of the arrangement and some of the words for football-tournament material, and it is a different recording from the one on the album — a distinction that still confuses streaming services and lyrics sites two decades later.

Wyclef Jean's verse references the Fugees, the group he formed with Lauryn Hill and Pras Prakazrel, and nods to the hip-hop lineage he came up in. The reunion the group was attempting around that time never produced the album it promised, which gives the line a slightly melancholy afterlife it did not have in 2006.

Charts & streaming

Hips Don't Lie reached number one in seventeen countries, including the United States — Shakira's first American chart-topper, and the record that proved a Spanish-language artist singing mostly in English could lead the Billboard Hot 100 outright rather than as a novelty.

It became one of the best-selling singles of 2006 worldwide and went on to be certified multi-platinum across Europe, the Americas and Australia. In the United Kingdom it spent a month at number one.

The performance also rescued Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 commercially: the reissue that carried the single sold in quantities the original release had not approached, and the album's touring cycle expanded accordingly.

Two decades later the song remains one of the most-streamed of her catalogue and the moment most reliably shouted back at her in concert.

The official video has passed one billion views on YouTube, a threshold only a handful of records from that era have crossed, and the track was re-recorded in 2025 as a Spotify anniversary version with Beéle and Ed Sheeran — a different recording again, and not the one on this card.