maxiewawa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KNEAk7g9L8

The last part of the taxi driver series! Where are we this time??

I realise now that the whole idea behind the Taxi Driver series might not be immediately obvious. Let me explain!

The whole story starts about 9 months ago, when I started a 4 month course at Shanghai Foreign Languages university, studying Chinese. (Yes, I realise that in China Chinese isn’t a foreign language, I don’t know why they teach it at that university.) One of my classmates and her best friend were from Belgium.

At the end of the 4 months, when everyone parted, we promised to stay in touch. All being language students, we all promised that the next time we met, we’d be speaking each other’s languages. To this end, I’ve been listening intently to FrenchPod101.com, trying to learn French. At FPod101 last week, we heard a dialogue between two passengers in a taxi.

The dialogue goes something like this:
Passenger: The Champs ElysEes please.
Driver: OK.
Passenger: What’s that?
Passenger 2: That’s the Louvre.
Passenger: What’s that?
Passenger 2: That’s the … the…
Passenger: The Eiffel tower! Pfff… Really!
Driver: The Champs ElysEes. (We have arrived)

I adapted this to fit another city, Brussels, as a nod to my Belgian friends. The passengers wanted to go to an address in Brussels, and the landmarks they pointed out were notable Brussels locations. I hit up Hyunwoo, who helped me with the French for the various landmarks, we met up on Skype, I pressed “record” on Garageband, and we did our thing!

The idea to do the other languages was Hyunwoo’s. We adapted the same dialogue for Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

We had great fun and learnt a lot. Expect to hear a lot more of these little skits in various languages from Hyunwoo and I. And if you want to participate, let us know by replying to this message. And don’t think that because you don’t speak Chinese, Japanese, Korean or French that you can’t participate. The only reason we didn’t do more languages is that we don’t really have the expertise to adapt it into other languages, not because we didn’t want to.

More from Hyunwoo at why-be-normal.com.