Taxi Talks

Help Page

Taxi Talks are language lessons designed to help a speaker of any language learn any other language.

Taxi Talks are a basic language lessons designed to be offered in every language of the world. You can down load the audio and the written text for your language and then down load the parallel lesson for any language you wish to learn.


The Language Entry Form page.

TaxiTalks Taxi City,

It is very important for you to submit an audio recording of your language. Please read the text you have written into a tape recorder and send the tape to the web site:

TaxiTalks.com

or regular mail to:

Taxi Talks
Box 962
Berkeley, CA 94701-962
USA


It is OK to read all of your translation of Taxi Talks yourself but your tape will sound better if you can have others read the various characters statements. If you do read it all yourself, try and sound like the character you are portraying.

Basic Strategy of Taxi Talks

Taxi Talks is intended to be useful, practical, easy to use, efficient, brief, elegant, minimal and fun.

Taxi Talks is useful because it helps every person in the world communicate with every other person in the world. The babel that has existed between people for thousands of years can now be partly eliminated because any language can be accessed and learned directly from any other language. Even for major languages like English there are only a few languages that can be learned in a classroom setting or directly from books or recordings. With Taxi Talks and the internet that problem is eliminated by having parallel texts and conversations in all languages. Now it is possible to listen and read the lessons in your native language and then listen and read the same lessons in any language you wish to learn.

The major languages are already available and all that is required to complete a minor language is for one native speaker to fill in the Taxi Talks form. The form is standardized with short easy sentences. It is easy for a native speaker to fill in the blanks following each sentence with similar sentences in their own language. Hitting the submit button at the bottom sends the document to the Taxi Talks central server. Also they need to make an audio recording of their written text and submit the tape recording or MP3 recording to Taxi Talks. At the central server it will be verified that it is filled in the correct boxes and then posted to the Taxi Talks home site. There can be several translations of the same material for each language because within a language there are many ways of communicating the same general idea. When there are several submissions for the same language the ones which are clearest will be placed at the head of the list. An interesting feature of Taxi Talks is that it becomes possible---when there are several submissions in the same language---to blend several different individuals submissions into a single recording. That will make a more realistic and interesting conversation. These will be marked as a blend and placed at the front of the list of readings. Once the text and recordings are posted it is easy for individuals on the web to click on any language and hear native speakers recite the Taxi Talks lesson.

Learning a new language for an adult is difficult and tedious but the Taxi Talks lessons have been designed with situational difficulties that become more humorous with every cycle of hearing. You are expected to listen to them many times---they are language lessons after all---and each time you listen to a lesson the story becomes more interesting. The words still mean the same thing but the personal situation becomes more complex.

To make the groups of things easier to remember they have been placed together in a context. For example you will hear that all of the color words are used at one time at the bus stop. And all of the counting words are used in the taxi.

Return to: --- Taxi Talks Home Page ---

Mail to: Proba@home.com

Please put the name of your language, written in English, at the top of your mail.

[My language is ____________ ]


Liability disclaimer statement: These Probaways contain new and unique information that has been created, tested and retested by me alone. You must approach these findings and materials very carefully as your results may differ greatly from my experience and I can offer no recompensation of any kind for any injuries.

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