Use Football to Learn Languages!

By: Daryl | September 28th, 2009

Not entire languages of course. Just the football words.

Because football is global, it’s a great way to learn about other cultures. Most recently, Alessio posted an excellent article on Juventus Offside titled Alessio’s Comprehensive Calcio Dictionary, which is basically an English-Italian football phrasebook. If you want to know how to say “backheel” or “captain’s armband” in Italian, I highly recommend paying that post a visit.

There are other language based articles around The Offside and WorldCupBlog. Like our post listing how to say “goal” in various languages, or our post listing how to say “World Cup” in various languages. There’s even the English to American football soccer phrasebook we compiled to help David Beckham with his transition to MLS in 2007 (although apparently it didn’t work).

But of course those aren’t the only football language guides around…
Elsewhere on the internet, I found Spanglish 101 on Futfanatico, an entertaining guide to Spanish language football terms, complete with homework assignments like: “watch half a Mexican league game on Telemundo or a La Liga match on Goltv. No copying other classmate’s notes (apuntes)!”

Wikibooks has what looks like a comprehensive guide to everything ballon and but related in its French for Football Phrasebook.

The BBC’s language site has a nice guide to German football phrases, complete with audio clips, and even a choose-your-own adventure style virtual trip to an international match at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, where you attempt to make friends with a guy named Olli and eventually find yourself buying flowers for his wife. Weird but fun.

Do you know of any other useful or amusing online language guides that revolve around football? Let us know in the comments if so.

Some Related Stories:

Category: World Football

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Damian

Hi

nice post - thought you might be interested in a football site for learners of English - languagecaster.com - with weekly podcasts, football phrases and much more.
http://languagecaster.com/

Damian
Laurie

On a similar note, one of my personal favorite translation guide's was Daryl's "All the English Fabio Capello Will Ever Need."

http://www.worldcupblog.org/wo...
Juliet

That French list is an exhaustive testament to fans' devotion... and frequently hilarious. I love that some of the "standard" headlines are "Lyon overwhelms Auxerre," "Le Havre blow it again," and "Henry dropped again."

A very useful German site I started out with back in the day: http://www.abseits-soccer.com/....
Fernando

The amazing thing about learning about football by watching original television broadcasts (whether Brazilian language, Italian language and Spanish Language) is how interested foreign broadcasters are in the sport they are watching, in the United States we don't have that with the exception of Roy Hudson on GolTV, Americans continue to broadcast games as if almost falling asleep...
Thomas

Woah! That wikipedia french thing is ridiculous!
Laurie

I learned an amazing amount of Spanish in 2006 by watching the World Cup on the Spanish-language channel. (Which was the only channel we had at the time carrying the non-USA games.)
Rami

Shameless plug but I wrote about Tunisian football terms a while ago: http://tunisia.worldcupblog.or...
Francesco

I think another thing football teaches you is geography. I think I know every capital of every European country thanks to following European football all these years. How else would I know the capital of Azerbaijan was Baku?