not sportsfans
The geniuses who devised my language book decided that today is the first of 3 days devoted to sports.
None of the students present today -- me, a Chinese woman, a girl from Cyprus -- would be able to carry on an hour and a half sports conversation in our native languages. "I like baseball even though I rarely go to games and don't follow it much." "I played volleyball in high school." "Ping pong is very popular in China." was about all we had to say. Add in a language barrier & we were mute and unmotivated.
Our teacher was not, though. We learned all about Red Star Belgrade's world championship in 1991 & how the Serbian basketball team is excellent. He quizzed the Chinese woman on all things Yao Ming and looked quite disappointed when I couldn't name the best American tennis players.
two more days of this. . . at least it is nice to have a set of vocabulary that I won't use and therefore don't have to study. . .
None of the students present today -- me, a Chinese woman, a girl from Cyprus -- would be able to carry on an hour and a half sports conversation in our native languages. "I like baseball even though I rarely go to games and don't follow it much." "I played volleyball in high school." "Ping pong is very popular in China." was about all we had to say. Add in a language barrier & we were mute and unmotivated.
Our teacher was not, though. We learned all about Red Star Belgrade's world championship in 1991 & how the Serbian basketball team is excellent. He quizzed the Chinese woman on all things Yao Ming and looked quite disappointed when I couldn't name the best American tennis players.
two more days of this. . . at least it is nice to have a set of vocabulary that I won't use and therefore don't have to study. . .
posted by rachel @ 1:10 PM
4 Comments:
At 2:40 PM,
Anonymous said…
actually, the Serbian national team didn't do very good at the European Championships last year. Some of their best players didn't want to leave the U.S.
Most people don't want to leave the U.S. Probably because that's where the baseball and Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper is.
At 3:38 PM,
Anonymous said…
p.s.: Greece won. (the championships)
At 3:49 PM,
rachel said…
they also won the European soccer championships this year. The teacher expected the (Greek) Cypriot to be proud. She wasn't.
At 11:41 PM,
Anonymous said…
Maybe you could ask him how to say a top luger went to your high school and he's going to be in the Olympics, but he wasn't very nice to your friend in high school. Or isn't that really a sports conversation?
And I'm impressed if you could understand what folks were talking about even if that was the end of the conversation.
Momdre
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