Asking someone to slow down is a skill, not a confession.
There is a way to ask that keeps the conversation warm, and it works on almost everyone.
Read the guide →Home / Guides
GuidesEnglish for the moments that matter.
Most adults who move to an English speaking country can already communicate. These guides deal with the moments that arrive fast and leave no time to think.
Guides
Repair Strategies
Interrupting politely is allowed, and waiting is worse.
If you let three unclear sentences go past, you now have three problems instead of one.
Read the guide →Say it back, and you will almost never get it wrong.
Repeating what you understood in your own words is the most reliable check there is.
Read the guide →Guides
The Hard Situations
At the counter, the whole problem is speed.
Service language is fast, fixed and mumbled, and it is the same handful of questions every time.
Read the guide →Small talk feels harder than a serious conversation.
It has no agenda, no information to exchange and no obvious way to end, which is exactly why it unsettles people.
Read the guide →The telephone is hard because the face is missing.
On a call you lose every visual clue at once, and nobody warned you that you were relying on them.
Read the guide →You are not bad at English. You are new to these situations.
Most adults who move to an English speaking country can already communicate. What stops them is not vocabulary. It is a small set of moments that arrive fast and leave no time to think.
Read the guide →Guides
Speaking Without Fear
Build a small set of phrases you never have to think about.
Fluency feels like automatic sentences, and you can build those one at a time.
Read the guide →The fear of mistakes costs more than the mistakes.
Errors rarely break communication. The silence you use to avoid them almost always does.
Read the guide →Your accent is information about you, not a fault.
Being understood and sounding local are two different goals, and only one of them matters.
Read the guide →Guides
Listening
Fast speech is not faster words, it is joined words.
The problem is rarely speed. It is that the spaces you expect between words are not there.
Read the guide →Listen to the same short piece many times.
Repetition of one recording teaches you more than a constant supply of new ones.
Read the guide →You can follow a group by tracking the topic, not the words.
Group conversation moves fast because turns are short, and the trick is to stop chasing every sentence.
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