It is a Spanish village to me

Hello and welcome to another edition of SoundCzech, Radio Prague’s Czech language course in which you can learn new phrases through song lyrics. Today we´ll be listening to the Prague band Tata Bojs, who are well known for their playful songs full of puns and little jokes. Today´s song "Informační", or Informative, is swarming with Czech idioms.

Madrid, photo: archive of Radio Prague

"Internet není moje doména", Tata Bojs confess without shame that the Internet is not their domain. In other words, not really their cup of tea. When something is not your domain, then it is not something you particularly understand. Another way of putting it is to say "to není moje parketa", that it is not your parquet, or more loosely, your dance floor as dance floors used to be parquet floors. Then, when something is not your "parketa", it is not your field of expertise, simply, not a dance floor where you would feel secure and confident enough to perform a perfect cha-cha. But let´move on from flooring to a Spanish village, or "španělská vesnice". If you say something is a Spanish village to you– you mean that it is so distant and foreign you know nothing about it.

"Madrid is a Spanish village to me", sings the band and not in a mocking tone, mind you! As for me, I must admit, IT technologies are truly a Spanish village. To say merely that it isn´t my domain, or dance floor, would be a severe understatement. But anyway, there is still one more idiom waiting to be explored. So have another listen!

Not only can Madrid be a Spanish village to you, you can also "have hockey in NHL". I don´t know about you but on the few occasions I watched an ice-hockey match I found it difficult to follow what exactly was going on, given the breakneck speed of the game. So when you lose track of something, you have “hockey in it”. And that can happen easily when you skip several episodes of your favourite TV soap opera. Then you have hockey in who is dating whom, cheating on whom, plotting against whom and you are lost.

Well, after this nourishing dose of Czech idioms I can imagine you may well have hockey in it, particularly if Czech is a Spanish village to you.

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The episode featured today was first broadcast on May 2, 2009.