Reggaeton is sending China wild — and it’s teaching college students Spanish

Little-known artists have long bragged that they’re “big in Japan,” but a Spanish-language musical juggernaut is sweeping a much bigger market across the East China Sea.

With its Latin beats and pulsating rhythms, reggaeton music has conquered dance floors across the world, but it’s being put to a different use in China: college students are using the strains of J Balvin and Bad Bunny to help them learn Spanish.

According to a study from Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the number of Chinese students taking its translation and language science classes has risen 37% from five years ago, but China’s formal educational resources for learning Spanish are far less developed than they are for learning English.

Instead, students are turning to social media sites and streaming services such as NetEase Cloud Music (NECM) to engage with digital language content, with translations of reggaeton songs garnering millions of views on the platform.

The UPF study, which was published last month in the journal “Language and Intercultural Communication,” says that amateur translators often collaborate with Latin music lovers on the popular streaming site, using various “intercultural mediation strategies” to make it easier for the Chinese public to understand some of reggaeton’s more niche or idiomatic Spanish cultural references without Chinese equivalents.

The report says that around 2 in 3 translators get past the barriers of language and culture by swapping Spanish expressions with other Chinese imagery. The expression “get stood up,” for example, becomes “free[ing] a dove” — a Chinese expression for breaking a promise.

Even after they’ve cleared cultural hurdles, users wanting to spread hits such as “Despacito” and “Gasolina” to Guangzhou and Chengdu then need to satisfy China’s censors.

As with TikTok, certain words and phrases are redacted on Chinese social media, especially those containing sexual references, which regularly come up in reggaeton songs.

While asterisks placed between Chinese characters by translators can help bypass this censorship, Mandarin phrases and characters are usually not separated by spaces as they are in English. That means starring out frowned-upon language can alter the meanings of lyrics and add an extra challenge to translators.

Using cultural output such as French cinema or Italian cooking is a language learning method that has long been deployed by teachers the world over. Spreading reggaeton to China may be helping drive an interest in Spanish culture — at least at UPF anyway.

The university’s cohort of Chinese students has grown by almost a third to 275 in the past five years.

One of them, whose name the report changes to “Benito,” has 1,300 followers on NECM and his translations have been viewed more than 2 million times.