Día 25

¡Hola, guapo!

¿Cómo va todo?

I hope you can devote some time to Spanish soon! (I miss Andy's homework to look at! :-))

Today, I'd like to touch on sports.

1st. Watch this video and note the nouns of the different sports appearing on it.

As it happens in English, we can use different verbs to talk about doing sports. We'd use jugar (to play), hacer/practicar (to do/to practice, hacer is more common) .

These two verbs are irregular and the conjugation for present indicative would be:

Yo juego
Tú  juegas
Él juega
Nosotros jugamos
Vosotros jugáis
Ellos juegan  

Yo hago
Tú haces
Él hace
Nosotros hacemos
Vosotros hacéis
Ellos hacen  

I've marked in red the irregular forms. Lastly, we'd also use the verb to go (ir) for "ir en bicicleta" (to cycle). The verb of this conjugation is in a previous entry in this blog.

2nd. Considering the above, can you translate  the following sentences?


Rafa Nadal plays tennis

Pau Gasol plays basquetball

Messi and Di Maria play soccer

Jacques Costeau does diving

Jim and Andy play table tennis

Evelia and Elena plays volleyball

María José Rienda does skiing




 
I found this web which has some interesting resources related to sports!! There you can find some short extracts of Spanish conversations about sports with the English transcript slightly hidden (on top of the extract).

https://www.spanishlearninglab.com/sports-in-spanish-audio/

3rd. Listen to the different extracts following the Spanish text. Could you guess part of the meaning before checking the English transcript? Let me know how it went!



There's a little thing in this site I don't agree with. In this paragrapgh (from the website), I have changed the text a little bit (in green my part). Just let me know if there's anything you don't understand! :-) 

Definite articles for sports in Spanish

Focusing a bit on the grammatical structure, you should know that we use the definite articles such as EL and LA before most sports in Spanish, especially when they are mentioned individually. EL is used for sports in masculine form such as FUTBOL, TENIS and so on, whereas LA will be used for sports in feminine form like NATACIÓN as in the sentences “Me gusta el fútbol” and “Prefiero la natación”. When the name of the sport is used after the verbs JUGAR and PRACTICAR, we will use the preposition "a" (literally, it'd be something like "I play to hockey")  so something like “I play hockey” would be translated as “Juego al hockey” not “Juego el hockey”. That's because there's a contraction when we have a+el together.

¡Besos!