 URL |
John promised to stop singing the Curtis Blow hit (”We’re playin’ baaaaaaasketbaaaaaaallllllll….”) if you promise to listen and use this lesson on verbs and cheers any basketball fan might need. In this podcast, learn how to cheer on your team in Mandarin Chinese. At least you’ll make Yao Ming feel at home.
Not sure if your comment is appropriate? Check our Commenting Policy first.
New lesson idea? Please let us know on our contact page.
This feature is only available to paid subscribers. ChinesePod offers 5 paid subscription types.
| Basic | Starting from $5 per month |
| Premium | Starting from $17 per month |
| Praxis | Starting from $23 per month |
| Guided | Starting from $29 per month |
| Executive | Starting from $125 per month |
To find out more about these subscription types, please click here.
To upgrade your account, please click here.
This feature is only available to Premium, Praxis, Guided and Executive subscribers.
| Premium | Starting from $17 per month |
| Praxis | Starting from $23 per month |
| Guided | Starting from $29 per month |
| Executive | Starting from $125 per month |
To find out more about these subscription types, please click here.
To upgrade your account, please click here.
Supplementary vocab for this lesson: 前锋 (qiánfēng) forward 后卫 (hòuwèi) rear guard 上半场 (shàngbànchǎng) first half (of a game) 下半场 (xiàbànchǎng) second half (of a game) 防守 (fángshǒu) defend; guard 犯规 (fànguī) foul 裁判员 (cáipànyuán) ref
The Confucius Institute at University of Kansas posted a list of basketball terms at http://www.confucius.ku.edu/bball_terms.shtml. I learned that pick and roll is dǎngchāi (cèyǎnhù) 挡拆（侧掩护）. Aric, how about getting Jenny to translate a small portion of Baseketball the movie into Chinese on the Saturday Show? ;-)
Hi ChinesePod! I don't have interest in basketball. But I like watching football games on TV. I'm pleased that you also explained football terms. Is it OK to say "就是的" instead of "就是" ? And is it possible to replace "就是" with "真是" ? If possible, can you also say "真是的" ? Thank you.
What happened to lesson plans? I don't see that option at the top any more.
Hi, does anybody know what's going wrong with the servers?? There are some links that are not working properly. It seams the blog server is down.
All the chinese on the forum seems to be corrupt as well, I hope this isn't permanent?
Antonio and Bazza, We recently transferred some data, and a few bugs have arisen. We are working them out. Thanks for your patience! Rich, The lessons plans were discontinued last year because they took a lot of time to create, but very few people were downloading them. We decided we could help more ChinesePod users better by spending those resources on other new features and better podcasts. -John
EASILY HARD - I'm kinda curious about this lesson. If I overheard anyone (non-Chinese) uttering this podcast's scripted dialogue during a b-ball game I'd think they were pretty darn fluent in Chinese. How is this lesson an elementary lesson? The definition based on simplicity of grammar patterns?, type of words? 1. Personally some of these words and their pronunciations are particularly troublesome for me (传球 ch/zh, 抢篮板球 qiang/qiu, 灌篮 guan4). 2. They're low frequency enough in daily conversation that it makes them tough to remember. Unless I was a truely devoted sports aficionado going to weekly pub nights. 3. The hanzi aren't particularly easy. 灌, 锋, 攻 4. The sentence forms have lots of truncated grammar that isn't necessarily obvious how to generate for a non-native speaker, 抢篮板球也不行; 看，又进攻了; 再来个三分球 This is not to say that the dialogue examples weren't totally common, up-to-date, emotional, and relevant. The lesson was great. I just thought it could easily challenge an intermediate learner. I'm curious if Elementaries found this podcast quite 'elementary'? And hey, although the Chinese men's b-ball team will obviously have a large audiance at the Olympics, might I mention that the women's tennis double team has already won at Wimbledon and some of us are WAITING for the tennis podcast SERIES that will broadcast at all the levels!! 我没有耐心！ 开玩笑。
I can easily tell the difference between elementary and intermediate dialogues, elementary dialogue takes me 10 minutes tops to work through, intermediate about 3 hours hehe.
I think Bazza and me have the same chinese level. Same happends to me, going through elementary podcast is ver straigthforwad but intermediate...!!
But can I still chant "D-柵欄" (zha4 lan2)?
HARDLY - Yah, the more I think about this, the more I think this wasn't an elementary lesson, at least not how I define it. Elementary to me means simple daily high-frequency conversation. This dialogue doesn't occur frequently unless you're at a sporting event. This means that although Bazza and Antonio could pick up and go thru the vocab pretty quickly and easily, they'll likely forget it as there's little opportunity for them to incorporate and associate this vocab into their 'elementary' lexis. It's what I would call the deceptive siren call of too much vocab. Look at the expanded vocab that Connie came up with 前锋, 前锋, 后卫, 上半场, 下半场, 防守, 犯规, 裁判员. Do any of these words exist in some form or another in other elementary podcasts? Anyone think they're 'elementary'? Here's a quick quiz from the podcast, how do you say/write 'aerobics'? Think of explaining a baseball game to a non-native, non-US raised person who is at an elementary/intermediate English level, it's not easy "The short-stop will play the middle on a hitter that might bunt." "If he hits a fly ball the center-fielder will catch the ball and throw home." I wouldn't use this kind of vocab if I really wanted them to understand what I was saying and neither of us had a pdf file in front of us. I still think it's a great podcast and Cpod demonstrates how one can make almost any vocab and phrase accessible and highly memorable. What I'm advocating is taking more of the traditionally intermediate, advanced vocab and phrasing and putting it in this 'elementary' format. I call it 'bridge-podcasts'. Maybe they already are the podcasts at the far-end of the curve at each level and I'm just calling an apple a peach. I think these are the 'bridge-level' podcasts people are looking for. 就是我一个人的看法，你们的？ btw: aerobics is 有氧操 you3 yang3 cao1
Lantian, I think this lesson is a rather challenging elementary lesson, but mainly if you don't play basketball. For someone who does play basketball, these verbs and vocabulary are all extremely basic terms. In fact, some of them also apply to sports other than basketball. If you're living in China and you play basketball with Chinese friends often, then the language presented in this podcast is basic and quite necessary at a very early stage. If you're at the elementary level and you don't play basketball at all, you may want to skip this one. -John
Great dialog! Now as an avid tennis player, I am anxious to hear Jenny Zhu screaming at the top of her voice at a tennis match, cheering for her tennis idol Roger Federer. Could you please, please, do a similar dialog for tennis fans? Thanks! Al Shea
Lantian/John: Interesting discussion - you both have your points. The dilemma of "hear it once and then forget it" could indeed be solved by adding additional team-sports lessons with similar vocab (although I would definiately not be in the target group, for this lesson I had to look up ome of the English terms at Wikipedia...). But I would not call this a "deceptive siren call of too much vocab". If you are talking about a subject occasionally in your mothertongue the respective words are never "too much" - those words and phrases come back to you some day naturally (even more so if you are emotionally connected to the subject). And: It is a lot more rewarding to know such terms than only beeing able to say "I am hungry" and "I feel nauseous". I am convinced that you never forget completely, so there cannot be a "too much". 9 years ago I tried learning long context-free lists of words that I thought I might stumbe across later, like 打印机 (dǎyìnjī, printer) or 挖土机 (wātǔjī - excavator). That method was of course neither effective nor efficient (almost the Chinese "memorize the dictionary"). But guess what? I did indeed bump into those words later several times (the 挖土机 when my sons got a toy 挖土机). And now I know 挖土机 when I hear one. This week I heard 瑜珈 (yújiā - Joga) on the radio and thought I will never ever hear that one again. No way. And today it pops up again in a CPOD lesson...
I too agree that this is an elementary lesson, although I don't particularly care for criticism of slow and untalented players, unless they are professional, because I was and still am a "slow" and certainly not very talented player in many sports, just playing recreationally. Just looking at the length of the dialogue and length of the podcast makes it clear that it is not intermediate, and I have seen allof the vocabulary other than rebounds, drive, slam dunk and three pointer in college elementary Chinese texts and workbooks. Keep in mind that even at university level, the first two semesters (Chinese 101 and 102) are considered "elementary". As John indicates lots of the vocabulary is relevant for non basketball situations. If you're not a basketball fan, focus on the higher usage vocabulary and structure...As the Olympics approaches and with the popularity of Ying Mao, I wouldn't be surprised to see more about basketball...although i too would like to hear about the very strong tennis, table tennis, softball, gymnastics, diving and swimming athletes (lots of other very strong sports in China now too, so sorry if neglecting to mention others)
This was a tough elementary, but it certainly was elementary. The criticism about this lesson not containing enough high-frequency words is silly. There are plenty of high-frequency words taught on this site, and every once in awhile you get areas that you *have* to know but are not really interested in. Maybe this qualifies. But even so, if you listened to the translation, you would pick up the interesting connections there are between Chinese words, and see that even basketball relates to teaching (blackboard and backboard), other sports and strategic thinking in general (all the words about attacking, for instance), and those were just the connections that came off the top of my head. That being said, there were two things that made this lesson unnecessarily tough. 1) It was very hard to distinguish the two male voices. Until the translation, I thought it was one guy talking to himself or cheering on his team (or maybe the coach yelling from the sidelines?). 2) The end of the dialogue/translation makes *NO* sense! A slam dunk is a two-point shot. Then the guy says, "Go for another three-point shot." What???!
Quick clarification: You obviously don't *have* to know anything, but if you're going to be fluent in a language, then it'd be good to be familiar with lots of stuff, and that's the sense in which you have to know about basketball.
I am not interested in basketball, but would like to see something on tennis and badminton ....
Hi mike in Ewshot, We'll be covering a lot more of the Olympic sports coming up in this "Olympicks" series...so stay tuned, you will get your wish! ~amber ;)
[...] Hi mike in Ewshot,. We ll be covering a lot more of the Olympic sports coming up in this Olympicks series so stay tuned, you will get your wish! ~amber. – More – [...]
this is very helpful 2me i really appreciate this website for taking its time an giving the lesson....i wish i had a computer at home so i could listen all day but unfortunately i dont so i really listen when its time for me to listen at school in class!!!!!! thank u guys for all of the teachings an helpings in my learning the chinese language.
this web site is so good i just love it so much.
this is just a great lesson
How do you say:
this center is slower than a snail!
Zhe1ge zhong1feng1 bi3 snail man4 le!
this might be a cultural thing, but when i was listening (as best i could, which wasn't great) to the NBA when Channel 5 in China would broadcast the games, the announcers never seemed to say something bad about the players. Even those that played badly.
Good on you, cpod, for having basketball lessons.
I remember this being one of the first lessons on c-pod I listened too and it was too hard (but I was a newbie). I am about to watch my students play basketball and will hopefully use some of these terms today. I went to the confucious site and might even get to referee!!!