Speaking Part 2 最近認識的朋友 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a friend you met recently.

You should say:

• who this friend is
• when and where you met them
• what kind of person they are
• and explain why you became friends.

¹ A friend I've made fairly recently is a freelance illustrator called Yi-Hsuan, who's about my age — twenty-eight — and lives just two MRT stops away from me in the Daan district of Taipei. ² We met around eight months ago at a small specialty coffee shop where I happened to be queueing behind her on a Saturday morning.

³ What started the conversation was completely accidental. ⁴ She was holding a copy of a slightly obscure essay collection by a Taiwanese writer I'd been quietly obsessed with for years, and she'd clearly been annotating it heavily — there were Post-it tabs sticking out from at least a dozen pages. ⁵ I stared a moment too long, she noticed, and instead of looking awkward she smiled and said, "Have you read it?" ⁶ That was basically the entire opening.

⁷ As a person, Yi-Hsuan is one of those rare people who's genuinely curious about strangers without being intrusive about it. ⁸ She asks the kind of questions most people don't think to ask — not "what do you do?" but "what's something you've been thinking about a lot recently?" — and she actually listens to the answer rather than waiting for her turn to speak.

⁹ I think what made us become real friends, rather than acquaintances, was the slightly unusual fact that we both work alone from home and were both quietly lonely in a way we hadn't admitted out loud. ¹⁰ We've ended up doing what we call "parallel work sessions" twice a week — sitting at the same café table, both of us on our laptops, barely talking. ¹¹ It's the most natural friendship I've made as an adult, and oddly enough it grew out of barely speaking.

A friend I've made over the past year is a colleague called Wei-Ting who joined my company about ten months ago. I'd been the most junior person on the team for two years until she arrived, so I think we both quietly felt like outsiders in slightly different ways.

Someone I've become close to fairly recently is a woman called Mei, who I originally met through a small online book club during the second year of the pandemic. We didn't actually meet in person until eight months later — and then immediately ended up talking until two in the morning.

A friend I've recently made is my upstairs neighbour, Mr. Chen — who's actually about thirty years older than me. We started chatting last winter when I helped him carry an enormous bag of recycling down the stairs.