Week 5 · Session 4
On the phone
No face, no situation — and a kit for getting things repeated.
~40 minThe phone is harder, and here is why
4 minutes
On the phone you lose the two things you have been leaning on all course: the speaker's face and the situation. Add compressed audio and background noise and it is genuinely a different skill.
Being worse on the phone than in person is normal for every learner in every language. Plan for it rather than being surprised by it.
Watch: answering the phone, part one
8 minutes
The standard American phone openings. They are formulaic, which is good news — learn the handful of patterns and the first ten seconds of every call becomes predictable.
Watch: answering the phone, part two
8 minutes
The rest of the call. Watch for how people signal that a call is ending — the pitch drops and the phrases get shorter. Missing that signal is why calls end awkwardly.
Your phone kit
6 minutes
| Say | What it does |
|---|---|
| Sorry, the line is bad — could you repeat that? | buying time, blaming the phonealways acceptable |
| Could you speak a little more slowly, please? | a normal, polite requestpeople almost always do |
| Let me read that back to you. | confirming a number or a datethe most useful one |
| Can you spell that for me? | for names and places |
| So that's Tuesday the fourteenth, at three? | repeating the details back |
Blaming the phone is a real strategy and everyone uses it. “Sorry, the line is bad” gets you a repeat with no loss of face at all — and half the time the line really is bad.
Record your voice note
3 minutes
“Make an imaginary phone call to book a table for four people on Friday at seven. Include reading the details back to confirm them.”
Save it as “Week 5 — Voice Note 3”.
Get ready for your live class
4 minutes
Bring the three voice notes, the Workshop 5 recording, and your real-world Couldn't-Catch entries.
One week left. Week 6 puts everything together at full speed and ends with your final recording — the same task you recorded in Week 1, so you can hear the whole six weeks at once.