Taking a Taxi

Getting into a taxi abroad is a short conversation with a lot riding on it. The driver has to understand where you want to go, and you want to know what the trip will cost before the car moves.

What this conversation covers

The dialog follows a visitor and a city taxi driver through one complete ride, so the language is the language of the situation itself: giving an address with its street name, sorting out a suitcase, checking the price and the travel time, changing the destination partway, and handing over the money at the end. Dozens of useful words and phrases come with it, from a suitcase going into the bagagliaio to the reassuring words tariffa fissa. Numbers, place names, and polite requests turn up everywhere else in Italy too, so little of it stays in the back seat.

How the practice works

You watch a realistic conversation appear line by line and put sentences together word by word, picking from a set that includes tempting near misses like a wrong article or an informal verb ending. Native Italian voices read the dialog aloud, so your ear gets the same workout your eyes do. A round takes a few minutes, and any quiz can be replayed later when you want another pass at the phrases that slipped away.

Why the driver keeps saying Lei

Polite Italian does something odd that surprises most beginners: it addresses you in the third person, as though talking about you rather than to you. That is what Lei does, and it stays grammatically feminine whether you are speaking to a woman or a man. In writing it is usually capitalized, along with Le and La, which is how you tell the polite "you" apart from an ordinary "she" or "her" on the page.