How to make appointments in English?

Appointments are a vital part of business, whether it’s arranging an appointment to pitch to a potential customer, make an appointment for a conference call with a customer or postponing an appointment because something came up. And you can’t make it for the arranged time.

It goes without saying that you need to be able to do those things in your daily work. Can you? Using all the Calendly & Co makes short work of the whole thing and is the perfect workaround to emailing somebody (sb), calling sb or texting sb.

Let’s imagine you have to drop someone a mail or get on the blower, can you? To quote good old Bob the Builder, “Can we fix it? – Yes, we can”. I’ve put together a 3 part blog and vlog series to do just that. In reverse order, drum roll, please, we’ll look at postponing/cancelling in part 3. In part 2, we’ll focus on actually making the appointment in the first place and TODAY?

You’ll remember, I’m sure, a blog post about ‘What are collocations?’. If you missed it, here’s the link to the blog post What are collocations? | teatime titbits, but as a quick reminder, ‘to make’ and ‘an appointment’ is a collocation because you often use the verb ‘to make’ with the noun ‘(an) appointment’. Can you find any more ‘appointment’ collocations in the first paragraph? How many verbs can you think of which go hand in hand with ‘an appointment? What’s your guess? Why not tot them up and write your number in the comments below.

The one(s) with the nearest number to the final number in my latest video (see above) will have the proud honour of being “The Appointment King or Queen”. Good luck, guys and Happy Easter.

vital (wichtig), to arrange an appointment (einen Termin vereinbaren), to pitch sb (jdm einer Verkaufspräsentation geben ), potential customer (potenzieller Kunde), to postpone  (verschieben), to come up (hier: dazuzwischen kommen), “can’t make it for the arranged time” (es nicht zur vereinbarten Zeit schaffen),“It goes without saying ….“ (Es versteht sich von selbst ….),  to make short work of sth (nicht viel Federlesens mit etw machen), workaround (Umgehungslösung), to drop sb a mail (jemandem eine Mail schreiben),  to get on the blower (hier: jdn anrufen), to quote (zitieren), in reverse order (in umgekehrter Reihenfolge), reminder (Erinnerung),  noun (Substantiv), paragraph (Absatz), to guess (raten), to tot sth up (etw. zusammenzählen)

6 Gedanken zu „How to make appointments in English?

  1. Jenny Antworten

    I can come up with 32 verbs that go hand in hand with „appointment“. So, you should rather call me empress than queen. 😉

    btw: You can translate „to make short work of sth.“ almost literally. „Nicht viel Federlesens mit etwas machen“ is correct but very old-fashioned. I bet even most Germans would need to consult Duden with „Federlesen“. 😉 However, „kurzen Prozess mit etwas machen“ or „nicht viel/keine Umstände machen“ matches perfectly.

    • Dave Preston Autor des BeitragsAntworten

      Hi Jenny. That’s what comes of sleeping with the English dictionary under your pillow at night. I tell all my clients to do that,too. Somehow they don’t believe. I could do with getting a more modern German dictionary to sleep on, eh?!

      • Jenny Antworten

        Forget about the dictionary under your pillow. What‘s the benefit of a head full of single words? Your brain as „lexical database“ leads you nowhere (ok, maybe to a quiz show); a passive vocabulary is a nice-to-have – nothing more, nothing less.

        However – yep, it‘s getting a bit poetic now 😉 – what you really need as student is a passionate, almost unconditional and irrevocable love for the language you want to dive into. To a certain degree you have to eat, sleep and breath English (or any other language of choice). So first of all, a teacher has to be some sort of matchmaker – the student‘s heart is the key to fluency, whereas the brain and the ability to call on skills come second.

        And in case you‘re still longing for a stiff neck, please put something more entertaing under your pillow than a dictionary. I‘m sure your trusted dealer will be pleased to assist. 🙂

        • Dave Preston Autor des BeitragsAntworten

          Vocab, vocab, vocab, the more you know, the more you understand. And that’s where students feel the progress most. I understand more and with some lag time, for sure, can say more too.

          Anyone, who has such a wide range of vocab as you do, deserves a lot of respect – growth mindset leads to greatness. keep it up!!!

          • Jenny

            Nah… as a student you don‘t feel progess just by knowing a myriad of words. You can hammer a load of vocab into your brain (to a certain extent that might be satisfying although or precisely because you only focus on single words while leaving out the rest) but in the end you have to feel the urge to use it, too. And this doesn’t correlate with the amount of words you know. You need to love the language, for whatever reasons. Otherwise you remain silent and passive, if at all.

            Sure, the more you know, the more you understand. But here the wheat is separated from
            the chaff and one has to decide whether to live with understanding only fragments or to go the whole hog. It‘s a question of personal motivation, a certain feeling – in other words: the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset (which btw can even vary between different languages, I know what I‘m talking about 😉 ).

          • Dave Preston Autor des Beitrags

            I see what you mean, I didn’t think of it that way. Thanx 4 the insight. I’m sure you’ll love this video: Why some people become fluent in a language and others don’t. https://youtu.be/p_95KCYzxi8 . Hope you like it.

Schreibe einen Kommentar zu Dave Preston Antworten abbrechen

Deine E-Mail-Adresse wird nicht veröffentlicht. Erforderliche Felder sind mit * markiert