Taxi Language

Taxi Language

Dialogue 1·Dialogue 2·Dialogue 3·Dialogue 4·Dialogue 5·Dialogue 6·Dialogue 7·Dialogue 8·Dialogue 9·Dialogue 10

About the book

Taxi Language is a multilingual project to learn languages. It consists of 10 dialogues based on everyday conversations where a language is introduced. Taxi Language is a fast and intuitive method.

On the left menu you can find this method in different languages. The creation of this book has been supported by the European Union within the Erasmus program framework.^[1]

Author: Roger Borrell^[2]

The Taxi Method

The Taxi Method is a project designed and developed by Roger Borrell. It aims to introduce a language in an intuitive way and it allows to learn it by progressive acquisition just as small children learn languages. To achieve the objectives it is necessary to spend 30 minutes daily nonstop during 100 consecutive days. The method includes five steps: Listening, Imitation, Repeating, Acquiring and Linking.

Listening. Days 1-20. Listen to the dialogues as often as possible. The brain takes several weeks to distinguish and catalogue new sounds. Take your time. Enjoy these new sounds, babies listen for a whole year before they can reproduce sounds.
Imitation. Days 20-40. Imitate the new sounds you find funny. Notice how natives move their lips. Do the same yourself, move your mouth until you achieve to reproduce the sounds. Open your mouth, close it, move your tongue, position your lips as you'd do to kiss, place your tongue against your palate. Move it backwards. Your tongue needs practice, 'no more going by taxi'. Let your family laugh at hearing you trying to pronounce new sounds. Small children are also laughed at when they start speaking. Don't let that stop you. Children take at least three years to pronounce their language properly.
Repeating. Days 40-60. Repetition is the essence of acquisition. Repeat the sentences in the dialogues although you don't understand everything. Repeat them aloud as children do. Enjoy the new language: its pronunciation, sentence structures and idioms. The human brain is able to acquire languages but it needs time and information. Do not collapse nor give up. Repetition is the essential element
Acquiring. Days 60-80. At this stage you will start to understand the language slightly. First, you will only recognise isolated words, it is normal. You will need some time to understand an everyday conversation. At this point of the method you should provide yourself with some support material to complete the course.
Linking. Days: 80-100. The last stage consists of building your own sentences. You will need support material, especially reading a lot, and of course, a lot of patience. It is advised to use original english books with audiobooks and to listen to them while reading.

Dialogues

The Taxi method is meant to accelerate the process of learning languages, so the materials have been carefully prepared according to the following criteria:

Multimedia: Human beings learn naturally and get information in many different ways, using all senses: physical, such as hearing or sight, but also emotional. That's why we provide written texts, audio and images. Besides, the conversations have been made a little theatrical. The learning model is based on the Theory of Multiple Intelligences . Students will adapt their learning to their intelligence.
The most used word comes first. Many language learning methods start with numbers, days of the week, months of the year or colours and although they may seem important, they aren't. These words rarely appear in a basic daily conversation. To optimize learning, we start with the most habitually used words of a language, and we repeat them many times. The 700 hundred most used words in a language stand for the 90% of the words in everyday conversations^[3]. During the 10 lessons, you will easily learn the 500 most habitual words. The list used as reference NGLS-Spoken 1.1^[4] is a very complete list of the most used words in spoken English.
The 10 fundamental verbs. :There are 10 essential verbs which allow us to express a lot of things. They are all introduced in the first lessons, They are the following:

Verbs expressing identity or state: be
Verbs expressing necessity : need/ have to/ must
Verbs expressing possession: Have
Verbs expressing a request: can/may
Verbs expressing satisfaction: like
Verbs expressing a wish or will: want to
Verbs expressing opinion: think/ believe
Verbs expressing movement or change of location: go / come
Verbs expressing an action: Do/Make
Verbs expressing visualization: look / see/ watch

For collaborators

Wikibooks is a collaborative project. Anyone can help and collaborate.

All the pages can be modified. And that's why you can correct spelling errors, add dialogues or videos, translate the pages to your own language...
Adding extra exercises: A lot of languages need extra exercises. To add one to a dialogue, you only have to add a new page to it. For example if we add the word Exercise_1 to the root of Dialogue_1 we can make a new page under Taxi_Language/Dialogue_1/Exercise_1

Once we have the page we have to put a link of it on the original dialogue's page for everyone to be able to use it.

Dialogue: Dialogue 1
Exercise: Excercise 1
Link: Additional Excercises

For teachers

If you use this book for teaching teenagers, you can use it to address subjects with a large transcendence: immigration, social inequalities, relationships of couples, love, infidelity, sexuality...

Useful tools

Use the dialogues in other languages to understand the dialogues.

Translators

Google translate Chrome It translates the word or sentence selected. It can be installed as an extension of Chrome.
Google chrome translation snapshot
Google TM translator Firefox It translates the word or sentence selected. It can be installed as an extension of Firefox.
Google TM translator
App Google translator Firefox/Chrome It translates the word or sentence selected. Once selected, you must share it with the share tool.

Dictionaries

Pronunciation Tools

Frequency of words in a text

To know the frequency of words in a text, in order to know the key words we should learn, we can use the following procedure in GNU/Linux:

1. Create a text file using a text editor (vi, emacs, gedit, kwrite) and save it with the name text_a_analitzar.txt

2. Use the following command in the terminal:

sed -e 's/[^[:alpha:]]/ /g' text_a_analitzar.txt | tr '\n' " " |  tr -s " " | tr " " '\n'| tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | nl

It is important to point out that the command

 tr 'A-Z' 'a-z'

does not suppor UTF-8 and therefore the translation of DESPRÉS és desprÉs.

If we only want to look for the occurrence of a word.

sed -e 's/[^[:alpha:]]/ /g' text_to_analize.txt | tr '\n' " " |  tr -s " " | tr " " '\n'| tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | nl | grep "\sword_to_search_for$"

We can also create a script called search_freq:

#!/bin/bash
sed -e 's/[^[:alpha:]]/ /g' text_to_analize.txt | tr '\n' " " |  tr -s " " | tr " " '\n'| tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | nl | grep "\s$1$"

We can use it by doing:

 search_freq word_to_search_for

References

[1] Switch Project

[2] Roger Borrell

[3] Number of words needed to understand 90% or 95% of conversations

[4] NGLS-Spoken 1.1. Browne, C., Culligan, B. & Phillips, J. (2013)

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