Episode 170 How To Make Your English Polite Enough For Business

In this episode we're looking at how to use your tone to make your English more polite and consequently more acceptable in business situations. I'll also give you some tips for places to find more Business English to practise with and several different ways you can make your English more polite. BBC English At Work Playlisthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_48gP7OPnjU&list=PLcetZ6gSk969oGvAI0e4_PgVnlGbm64bp Vocabulary It's a chaotic outfit - 'chaotic' means without a plan and unpredictable. My outfit was warm, but not very fashionable and everything clashed! Stripes, checks, flowers! categorize - to organise things into boxes or groups tone - to way that we say something (happy, sad, professional etc) Let's set up a meeting - phrasal verb 'set up' - to organise or put in the diary I'll forward you the email - send an email on to another person Let's touch base next week - idiom 'touch base' from baseball English, means to connect or get in touch about this thing. businesslike - to be professional politeness - to be polite, well mannered extending the sentence - to make the sentence longer modals - An important part of speech in Englishhttps://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/english-grammar-reference/modal-verbs give me a hand - idiom - to ask for help with something get your ears used to the vocabulary - to practise listening to something that you don't usually listen to, so that you get better and hearing and understanding it casually use - use easily and without thought or challenge prioritize - to make something more important in your schedule, plan or system requests - to ask for something or to ask for someone to do something You can tag them onto any phrase - phrasal verb 'to tag onto' - to add easily to a phrase. 'Please' is especially easy because it can go at the beginning, middle or end of a sentence and still be good grammar. broken English - a common phrase used to describe beginner level English. While this phrase is commonly used by native speakers and teachers, I realised in this episode that it's a really unhelpful and quite dismissive phrase to describe that I have used to describe someone's efforts to learn another language (which is really hard to do!). So I'm going to try not to use it anymore, because it's not accurate and it's not very nice.