Daily Dose of English 182
Hockey
Daily Dose of English 182
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about hockey, the sport of hockey. And this is another sort of mini series within this podcast where we talk about various sports and stuff. I don't know. So let's get into it. Let's talk about hockey. Hockey is an interesting sport and it's actually one of my favorites for watching. I really don't watch a lot of sports, as I've said before, but it's one of the few sports that I have watched and will watch, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But it's fairly popular in the U.S., typically around the places where there is a hockey team, which kind of makes sense, right? So the places that have a hockey team have a lot more hockey fans than the places that don't. There aren't that many hockey teams in the U.S., though, so it's still a fairly small sport when compared to other countries that really like hockey. which is one of them is Canada, for example. And the Canadian and US hockey, I guess, teams play together every year. So it's called the NHL, the National Hockey League, which is actually international, which is kind of funny. And I don't, remember which exactly which ones are oh yeah here it is so there's like a yeah I'm looking at a list of all the teams and so there's a bunch of teams that are in in the in the US but then also plenty that are in like Edmonton which isn't in Canada Calgary I think Anaheim's in California. Winnipeg is in another Canadian team. The Toronto Maple Leafs. There's the Ottawa Senators, Montreal Canadiens. So there's a bunch of Canadian teams in this, in the NHL. Yeah, I think those are the ones. So it's still mostly American teams, but those are some bigger teams. And Canada is a smaller country, and so, the bigger teams cover more ground, I guess you could say. However, the other interesting thing is that hockey is a lot more popular in Canada, but like a lot more among smaller teams. And it's like a sport that a lot more younger people play, right? Kids play or it's in university. And so it has a different like level of popularity. Right. So I think a good example is soccer in the U.S. because it's not the most popular sport to watch. Right. That's American football. But soccer is still played by so many kids and adults and teenagers. And it's very, very popular to play. It's just it's not as popular to watch. and it doesn't have quite as much money in the U.S. specifically, just because the viewership of American football is so high. But it's really popular to play soccer. I think most sports-playing kids play soccer. It's just so popular to play when you're young, when you're It's also great for a pickup game, right? If you're going to, as an adult that hasn't, isn't really a, an athlete, like you go hang out and play soccer with your friends at the park, it's still a very popular game for playing. And that's, that's sort of where, um, hockey sits within Canada where every like so many people grew up playing some sort of hockey or watching it or at the universities or whatever it is. And so it's definitely more popular there. But you can totally find hockey fans in the US, especially in like I said, places that have a hockey team. And especially that hockey team is pretty good. If the hockey team is pretty good, then a lot more people are going to want to watch and yada yada yada. Um, I, I've gone to some hockey games, none professional though. I've only seen, um, some, what you call my amateur games. Cause in Portland where I grew up, there were no professional teams. There was only some teams of, um, I don't actually remember what they're called, but they had mostly younger and like high school and college students playing that were either trying to get a scholarship or go play professionally in some way. And those are pretty fun. Those are there. There's smaller games, they feel like you're going to a smaller game but they were always pretty fun to go to. I think I went to like three or four. I don't really remember. I do remember though that at one point, I think the first one that I went to, I was with my family and they were doing some sort of raffle or drawing for free tickets. and my dad entered for me and he said he just had a feeling that I was going to win and I did which is like I got free tickets to another game and he's like yeah I just had this feeling that you were going to win so I went and I entered and you won and I was like that's weird but you know I don't think very many people entered for the free tickets because it was like a small thing and like they're they're not like expensive tickets anyway so that was a funny thing Hockey is a sport with like a lot of equipment and terms, right? So if you're a hockey fan, you might learn words like hockey stick, hockey puck, skates, right? There's so many different terms for also what happens in the sport, right? So there's things like icing and elbows and high sticking, right? There's all these different things that can happen in the sport that you're gonna have to learn. Power play, What other terms are there? Penalty, penalty box, pull the goalie. There's so many different words you can learn. And that's gonna happen in every sport, probably. But there's some that have like, basically fewer like weird rules. Like, I think there's just more terms that you're going to come across in a sport with a ton of special equipment and kind of strange rules. Baseball has a lot of weird words. I don't know. It's a strange sport, baseball. And hockey kind of falls closer to that than what I'd call a straightforward sport like soccer where you can find some words like offsides. whatnot, but there's not that many like totally strange terms because soccer makes more sense when you watch it. You're like, okay, I get what they're doing. You can't touch the ball with your hands. You got to get the ball into the net. Okay, easy. Yeah, there's more corner cases and stuff and it's also a complicated sport, but there's a difference in like just like the amount of crap you got to bring to the game basically. But something kind of funny about hockey is that I only watched a little bit of human hockey. I watched, I think for one season when I was young, I followed a little bit. And like I said, I went to some games of the local team in Portland. But I watch a fair amount of virtual hockey, which is, I think, a little bit weird, because there was a YouTuber or two, when I was growing up, that did series on playing hockey. There's some other 2D hockey games, or 3D hockey games, 2D, I don't remember. And I found that pretty fun to watch. I don't like watching pretty much any other sports games. I'll play one if somebody's like hanging out, but like I haven't played a sports game in so long, but I do enjoy watching hockey games for some reason. I don't know why I don't really care about real hockey, but I find them kind of entertaining and like the watching somebody play the video game. And yeah, I don't know why. It's strange. But if you're curious at all on watching some good fake hockey, it's not really a hockey, I mean, it's sort of a hockey game, but there's a streamer that I like, his name is Northern Lion, Canadian, but American accent, right? That's what a lot of Canadians from the West have. But he played, oh, what's that? Ah, I'm gonna have to Google it. Northern Lion Hockey. I'm just gonna Google that. How do you spell hockey? It has an E in it, right? Yeah, it does. Where does it, it was relatively recent. It was like a couple of, oh, it's called Tape to Tape. That's what it was, yeah. Tape to Tape is a very fun, not real hockey, Um, but it is a, uh, sort of a, a play on hockey where like you get like power ups and your teammates are, um, I don't know. It's, it's fun. It was a fun thing to watch. Definitely recommend if you're interested in, in watching some sports and you want some good immersion content in. American, Canadian English. So yeah, I don't know why that I've been more interested in virtual, not real hockey than real hockey, but you know, that's what happened. I don't know. That's all I got for you. Yeah, that series was about a year ago and I quite enjoyed it, but yeah. Anyways, that's basically this episode. I don't really have a whole ton to add. I don't know that much more about hockey. I don't really know many more words or can't really explain much of it, but you can definitely Look things up if you wanna watch hockey. There's plenty of hockey coverage if you wanna follow hockey and read stuff in English. People write a ton of stuff in English on the internet about various sports that they like. So if you're a sports fan and like hockey, definitely look into it. But that's everything from me today. I hope that you enjoyed. If you did, make sure to leave a comment down below with something that you learned and maybe a sport that you're interested in. But I'll see you again in the next episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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