111 Learning Journal #5

[Daniel Matthew Kunath]

On a wild hair, we decided to dedicate a few classes to learning about sports and games. I had mixed feelings learning about this topic. Sporty feeling was in the air, in the wake of March Madness, and with the weather getting a little bit warmer. I’m eager to learn about these topics, so that I might be able to speak about and offer to play with others in Greek. Many of the names for sport are foreign, such as “Μπάσκετ” (“Basket”, basketball). However, a great number of them only have Greek names that would be recognizable to Greeks, such as ορεινή ποδηλασία (mountain biking). My concern for these is that their names for sports tend to be very long, and will be a bit of a struggle to memorize. Fortunately, many of the games have shorter names than the sports, and most of the verbs and people associated with sports have some connections to English. I anticipate that my challenge here will be just memorizing sports names.