This week, Dr. Heidi talks about soccer. She talks about some linguistic and cultural differences regarding soccer in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world, and talks about the game and the Women’s World cup.
Watch this week’s video on YouTube below.
Here are the 20 words for week 25. You may know some of these words already. However, it’s very important with vocabulary that you practice the words that you already know in addition to learning new words. This is all good practice and will help your language skills. All these definitions are from the Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary, which is highly recommended for English language learners.
| Word | Definition |
|---|---|
| school | a place where children go to learn |
| sport | a contest or game in which people do certain physical activities according to a specific set of rules and compete against each other |
| fair | treating people in a way that does not favor some over others |
| attention | the act or power of carefully thinking about, listening to, or watching someone or something |
| controversy | argument that involves many people who strongly disagree about something; strong disagreement about something among a large group of people |
| equal | the same in number, amount, degree, rank, or quality |
| football | an American game that is played between two teams of 11 players each and in which the ball is moved forward by running or passing |
| uniform | a special kind of clothing that is worn by all the members of a group or organization (such as an army or team) |
| equipment | supplies or tools needed for a special purpose |
| completely | having all necessary parts; not lacking anything |
| guard | a person whose job or duty is to watch and protect someone or something |
| adult | a fully grown person or animal |
| clean | free from dirt, marks, etc.; not dirty |
| pass | to throw, hit, or kick a ball or puck to a teammate |
| linguistic | of or relating to language or linguistics |
| weird | unusual or strange |
| difference | the quality that makes one person or thing unlike another |
| expression | a word or phrase |
| match | a contest between two or more players or teams |
| opponent | a person, team, group, etc., that is competing against another in a contest |
This week, Dr. Heidi talks about the sport of soccer. Here is the text of this week’s video:
So I’m going to tell you a little bit about soccer today, but first, we have to talk about the vocabulary. Now I’m an American, wo when I speak I use American English pronunciation and American English vocabulary, which is generally the same as vocabulary around the world. However, there’s this word soccer so in the American English soccer is this game. We also have a game called football, which is this game. But everywhere else in the world this game is called football and this game is called, I don’t know, that weird American game. I think it is kind of interesting to pay attention to these little linguistic differences because otherwise you can tell people that you pay football and if you’re talking to an American they might have a completely different idea of what sport you play.
So, there’s something else that’s kind of interesting about soccer in the United States and that is that it’s really not that popular. In the rest of the world it’s very popular, and when you have the big matches like the World Cup the Women’s World Cup, yes, Americans will watch it because we like watching good sports played at a high level.
Soccer, interestingly, is played in schools. It’s played by children. So for example when my sister was 8 years old she played soccer all the time. She was on a team. It’s a very common thing. We even have an expression called soccer mom which describes a person usually the mother whose kids are in soccer. This is a lot of work for the mom because she has to drive them to the practice and drive them to the games and fix their snacks and clean their uniforms and buy their equipment, and so forth. The main idea that I’m trying to tell you is that even these people that that love soccer and play it growing up, as adults they don’t watch soccer on TV. In the United States we watch football. We watch baseball. We watch basketball. I’ll talk about those sports in other videos but soccer is just in general it’s not that popular in the United States so that’s kind of interesting because the rest of the world is just crazy for it.
So let’s look at this Wikipedia Simple English article. Again, it says “football” because it’s an international web site. Let’s look at some of the rules of soccer. The main rule with soccer is you cannot touch the ball with your hands. You can touch it with your feet. You can touch it with your body. You can even hit it with your head, which to me it seems to like a crazy thing to do, but people do it all the time. You try to get the ball into the goal. The only exception to the rule about not touching the ball with your hand is the goal keeper or goalie, the person whose job it is to guard the goal. That person can block the ball with their hands. So two teams are fighting over the ball. You try to pass the ball to your teammate, and the other team will try to get it. You try to get the ball into the opponent’s goal, and the other team tries to get the ball in your goal. The team with the most goals wins. So that’s soccer.
Right now there’s the Women’s World Cup soccer. The American team is favored to win. One of the big controversies that’s happening around the Women’s World Cup is the fact that the women’s soccer players get paid a lot less than the men’s soccer players. And if you think about it that is unfair. It’s just unfair if you have two teams and both of the teams are playing really hard, and are doing a sport that millions of people are watching, and the people that sell the broadcast rights are making a lot of money, it’s really not fair that the women players are not getting paid as much as the men players. Some people say, oh, they shouldn’t talk about it. They should focus on the game. Well nobody ever got what they wanted by not talking about it. If you see something that’s wrong and you don’t say something about it, it will never change. And that is true of everything that I know of. So that was my short demonstration about soccer with a few comments about equal pay thrown in for good measure. in coming weeks I will tell you about other sports. I will tell you about the American game of football and I will tell you about our other favorite sports basketball and baseball.
When you learn new words, it’s important to use them in order to help remember them. On the Vocab Victor YouTube Channel, you can join a conversation using these words. Type a question in the comments section using one of the vocabulary words, such as, “What is your favorite sports team?” Then, answer a question someone else has given. Come back to this page later to see if people have answered your question!
Finally, download our app Vocab Victor which is available for Apple and Android phones. This vocabulary learning software will help you build and strengthen your vocabulary. What does that mean? Build and strengthen. Build vocabulary means it will teach you new words. Strengthen means it will improve the knowledge of the words you already know. Play Vocab Victor for a few minutes every day to help improve your English! Read more about Vocab Victor at our page for students, Vocab Victor - Students.