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Showing off your chinese to the taxi drivers XD

I Have a Question
#1

@Constance_Fang @Fiona and the ChinesePod team, my question is this:

大家好！So, every day I see myself taking a taxi, the funny thing is: I use this opportunity to practice my chinese, talking about my homecountry Brazil, talking about the taxi drivers’s impressions about Shanghai, where they are from and etc. However, everytime I sit in the car and as soon as I say the address (and they comprehend me), they start to ask me other informations that I can’t understand, mainly when the road I say is really long and they need a reference. So, may I ask you to help me with some useful and common phrases taxi drivers could ask me so I could stop saying “听不懂，听不懂!” and then they would get upset. Help me give a good first impression and show off my chinese to them XD! Thank you, guys.

#2

Hey, I had the same experience when I started to talk to a taxi driver in Chinese. XD
Fortunately, I could still understand what he said. Let me give you a few useful phrases:

  1. use 靠近… or 在… 附近 or 在…的后面 when they need a reference, you could say 靠近 some typical building or a metro station or another road nearby etc.
  2. they probably wouldn’t know which lane 弄堂 or which street 街道. So I just let them know the road name I’m going to. Then when you get off the taxi, you could ask another person for the lane/street no
  3. I would suggest you use Baidu map 百度地图, Gaode map 高德地图 or similar mobile app to navigate 导航 to the destination. You can then let the driver know where to turn left/right if the road name doesn’t sound familiar to them.