Table Tennis

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your comments which we have all read with interest. Well,  I am back this week with more Olympic sports as some readers requested more chats about sports.

After Aquatics(水上运动) which I talked about a couple of weeks ago, I am going to focus on one of the most popular sports for Chinese people: Table Tennis（乒乓球）.

Now suppose someone asks you in English what table tennis is?  How do you define it? Well here is a definition from the famous Wikipedia website:  ‘table tennis is asportin which two or fourplayershit a lightweight, hollow ball back and forth to each other with paddles. The game takes place on a hard table divided by a net.’

Well, it sounds quite complicated, doesn't it？The reason why I start with this definition is I find it difficult to define things in English myself. It is one of the areas that  Chinese learners of English are not so used to.

Table tennis can be regarded as the most popular sport in China where almost everyone has played at some stage in their life.  Let’s have a look at the history of the game first.

---The very first World Table Tennis Championships was held in 1926 in London. (第一届世界乒乓球锦标赛是1926年在伦敦举行的) The Hungarian team won all the categories at the competition.（匈牙利队获得了所有五个项目的冠军）

I am a bit surprised to learn that table tennis was only added to the Olympic Games in 1988。(1988年乒乓球被列入奥林匹克运动赛项)

Of course when Chinese people talk about table tennis they cannot fail to mention ‘Ping Pong Diplomacy’(乒乓外交)- the magic ball that played a public role in improving diplomatic relations between China and the United States.  It all started at the beginning of 1971 when a US table tennis team visited Japan to participate in a competition. They were then invited to visit China. However, this invitation came only after a long period of diplomatic negotiations between the two countries.
In July 1971, the then United States Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, paid a secret visit to China to pave the way for a visit by the then US president Richard Nixon in 1972.  Then a new era began in the bilateral relations（两国关系的新纪元）of the two giant countries in the world.

OK, back to Ping Pong, the Ping Pong diplomacy in the 1970s did indeed sent the whole country into Ping Pong mania,(全国乒乓球热) .  It has certainly borne fruit:
In the last 20 years, the Chinese Table Tennis teams kept breaking records and out-performed many other teams in high level competitions including the World Championships and the Olympic Games.


Well, that’s just a short introduction to the history of table tennis. If you are interested in more Olympic programmes from BBC learning English, just click on these links to find more.

Having talked about the history of  table tennis, what if people ask you to explain the rules of table tennis in English? That’s going to be difficult, isn’t it?

Don't worry next time on the blog I will help you with this.

All the best,

Yang Li