Four songs for contrasting que & lo que

If you're going to explain to students the difference between que and lo que and expect that to do the trick, good luck. I don't think I've ever taken the time to explain the difference in my class, but it's interesting to see how students use it just with input. For a more focused approach, to take advantage of noticing, try using these songs and just pointing out the most obvious contrasts.

For 'que,' you need input where the 'que' appears at the beginning a lot. It's easy enough to understand that 'que' joins to clauses, but what about at the beginning of an expression? For this, try the songs "Tú no eres para mí" by Fanny Lu and "Quién te dijo eso" by Luis Fonsi:


For 'lo que', you need the same thing in order to make a good contrast. For this, try the songs "Lo que me gusta a mí" by Juanes and "Esto es lo que soy" by Jesse y Joy:


I especially like these because in each pair, one is fast and one is slower, and there's one guy (well, two if you count Jesse) and one girl, so they're appealing in different ways to different audiences.

(Note: Fanny Lu's too skanky to show in my class, at least all of her videos except 1 that I've seen. The Juanes video is just the song. The Fonsi video is fine but a copyright violation in my opinion and likely won't be on Youtube for long. The Jesse y Joy is the only one that's classroom-worthy without copyright problems.)