How to Handle Phone Calls in a New Language: Useful Expat Guide 2026 (with abblino)

If you’re an expat, you’ve almost certainly had this moment: you’ve managed to order coffee, navigate the supermarket, maybe even survive a conversation with your neighbour, and then your phone rings. And your brain, without warning, goes completely blank.

Phone calls are their own beast. Face-to-face conversations give you a whole ecosystem of support, facial expressions, hand gestures, shared context, the ability to pause naturally and point at things when words fail. On the phone, all of that disappears. You get audio, sometimes poor audio, a voice that’s usually speaking at full native speed, and a ticking clock of awkwardness whenever silence stretches too long. Add the fact that phone calls tend to involve genuinely high-stakes content, medical appointments, landlords, utility providers, banks, and it’s no wonder that even confident language learners dread them.

The solution is not “get fluent first and then make the calls.” That logic will keep you on hold forever. The solution is to treat phone calls as a distinct, trainable skill, one that has its own vocabulary, its own structure, and its own failure modes, and to practise that skill deliberately with tools like abblino, which can simulate the realistic chaos of a real call before you’re actually on one.

This guide gives you everything you need: a reusable call structure, a survival phrase kit, number and detail drills, a daily ten-minute routine, a themed weekly plan, and six copy-paste prompts for abblino role-plays you can use today.

TL;DR – How to Handle Phone Calls in a New Language

If you only have two minutes, here’s the whole system in a nutshell:

• Use one reusable call script that works across almost every scenario: open, identify yourself, explain the issue, make the request, confirm the next step, close politely.
• Master four survival moves: ask them to repeat, ask them to slow down, ask them to spell it, confirm what you understood.
• Train numbers, dates, and spellings specifically, because most phone-call stress comes from missing a time, a fee, or a reference number, not from failing on grammar.
• Use abblino call simulations to rehearse at realistic speed, with interruptions, hold phrases, and follow-up questions built in.
• Measure progress by outcomes, not fluency: “I booked the appointment.” “I understood the next step.” “I got a written confirmation sent to me.”

Why Phone Calls Feel So Much Harder

It helps to understand exactly what makes phone calls difficult, because “the language is hard” is only part of the answer. What you’re actually dealing with is a stack of challenges that all hit at once.

No visual information. When you speak to someone face to face, you’re reading their lips, watching their hands, picking up their expressions. On a phone call, you lose every single one of those channels. Your brain has to work significantly harder to extract meaning from audio alone.

Faster, less careful speech. People on the phone, especially in customer service, speak at full native speed because they’re trained to move through calls efficiently. They don’t slow down the way a friendly neighbour might. They also use a lot of set phrases and institutional language (“your reference number is,” “we can offer you an appointment on,” “you’ll need to have your account number ready”) that learners may not have encountered yet.

Worse audio quality. Accents are harder to decode over the phone. Background noise, compression artefacts, and the slightly unnatural quality of phone audio all compound the difficulty. A voice you’d understand perfectly in person can become surprisingly hard to follow through a handset.

High-stakes content. Most of the calls expats dread involve things that really matter: appointment times, payment amounts, addresses, reference numbers, deadlines, documents required. Missing a digit or a date can mean a missed appointment or an unpaid bill. That pressure makes it harder to listen clearly, which is precisely the opposite of what you need.

The silence problem. In conversation, silence is manageable. On a phone call, silence feels like failure. This creates a panic loop: you don’t understand, you go silent, silence makes you more anxious, anxiety makes it even harder to think. Breaking that loop is a key part of what this guide trains.

Understanding this stack is reassuring, actually. It means phone-call difficulty is not a sign that your language level isn’t good enough, it means you haven’t yet specifically trained phone calls. That’s a fixable thing.

Step 1 – Build Your Universal Call Script and Memorise It

The most effective thing you can do before making any call is to have a script. Not a word-for-word transcript, but a clear skeleton of what you’re going to say and in what order. This does two things: it reduces the amount of working memory you need to spend on what to say, freeing up more of your brain to listen; and it gives you a safe path back if the conversation goes off track.

Here is a six-part structure that works across almost every expat scenario:

The Universal Call Script

1. Greeting and purpose – State immediately why you’re calling. Don’t wait to be asked.

• “Hello, I’m calling about my appointment / my bill / my internet connection.”
• “Good morning – I’d like to book / cancel / change ___.”

2. Identify yourself – Give your details clearly and slowly. Have them written in front of you.

• “My name is ___, spelled ___.”
• “My customer number / reference number is ___.”
• “My date of birth is ___.”

3. State the problem or request in one sentence – Keep this tight. One issue at a time.

• “The issue is that my package hasn’t arrived.”
• “I’d like to change my appointment to a different day.”
• “I haven’t received my bill and the payment date is approaching.”

4. Make a clear request – Tell them what outcome you want.

• “Could you help me reschedule?”
• “I’d like to know the next available appointment, please.”
• “Could you send me written confirmation by email?”

5. Confirm the key details back – This is the most underused step and possibly the most important. Do not hang up until you have confirmed the essential information.

• “So the appointment is on Tuesday the 14th at 16:30, is that right?”
• “Just to confirm: the reference number is ___, and I need to bring ___?”
• “And someone will contact me within ___ days, correct?”

6. Close politely – A warm, clean ending leaves a good impression and signals you’re in control.

• “Perfect, thank you so much for your help. Have a lovely day.”
• “Great, thank you. Goodbye.”

Practise this script out loud every day for a week – not with different content each time, but with the same skeleton. The goal is for the structure to feel automatic so that when the call is live, you’re only filling in the blanks, not constructing sentences from scratch under pressure.

Step 2 – Learn the Ten Phone-Only Survival Phrases

These are not vocabulary. They are functional tools, phrases that keep the conversation under your control when it threatens to get away from you. Memorise them the way you’d memorise a safety procedure: so that they come out automatically, without thinking.

Ask for repetition or slower speech

• “Sorry, could you repeat that, please?”
• “Could you say that more slowly? Thank you.”
• “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Could you say it again?”

Check your understanding

• “I understood ___, but I’m not sure I caught ___. Could you repeat that part?”
• “So you’re saying ___, is that right?”
• “Let me just check I understood: ___. Is that correct?”

Ask for spelling or written confirmation

• “Could you spell that for me, please?”
• “Would it be possible to send that by email or text?”
• “Could I get that in writing just to be sure?”

Handle numbers and dates

• “Could you repeat the number / date slowly, please?”
• “Is that one-five or five-zero?” (Clarifying digits is completely normal, natives do it too.)
• “So that’s the 14th, not the 4th?”

Ask for the next step

• “What should I do next?”
• “Is there anything I need to bring / prepare / send?”
• “Who should I contact if I have a question?”

If you can only learn one category before your next real call, make it the confirmation questions. Confirming what you understood, even if you understood it perfectly, is not a sign of weakness. It is what professionals and careful native speakers do, and it prevents the vast majority of expat admin mistakes.

Step 3 – Train Numbers, Dates, Spellings, and Details Separately

This is the part of phone-call preparation that most language courses completely ignore, and it’s the part that causes the most real-world problems.

Think about the information that gets exchanged on a typical expat phone call: appointment times, reference numbers, addresses, postcodes, email addresses, fee amounts, callback numbers, opening hours, document names. Almost all of it is made up of numbers, letters, and dates, delivered quickly, often in a format that’s specific to the country you’re in.

French dates are structured differently from English ones. German numbers use different stress patterns. Spanish telephone numbers are read in pairs. If you haven’t specifically practised these patterns, you will miss them even if your general language level is solid.

Drills to build this skill

Number echo drill. Hear a number, say it back immediately. Start with short sequences (two or three digits), then build up to reference numbers (eight to ten digits), phone numbers, and amounts with cents or decimals. You can use abblino to generate these in a call-simulation format.

Date confirmation drill. Practice both giving and confirming dates: “So it’s Wednesday the 22nd at 14:15?” Do this until you can do it without pausing. Dates in speech sound very different from dates in text, and the answer to “next Tuesday” changes depending on what day you’re calling.

Spelling out loud drill. Spell your name, your email address, and your street address at normal speaking pace. Most expats have a name or an address that doesn’t follow the phonetic rules of the local language, and having to spell it under pressure while also trying to listen to the agent is genuinely cognitively taxing. Practice it until it’s automatic.

Digit clarification drill. Practice the phrases for distinguishing similar-sounding numbers: fifteen vs fifty, thirteen vs thirty, one vs seven (in languages where these sound similar over the phone). Ask your abblino simulation to deliberately deliver ambiguous numbers so you can practice asking for clarification.

A useful pronunciation reference for checking how individual words or numbers sound in your target language is Forvo, where you can hear native speakers say virtually any word in hundreds of languages . If you’re working on your English specifically, BBC Learning English has excellent listening exercises built around real-world scenarios .

Step 4 – Follow the Ten-Minute Daily Phone Routine

Consistency beats intensity for this kind of skill. Ten focused minutes every day will do more than an hour once a week. Here’s how to structure those ten minutes so each one is purposeful.

Minutes 1–3: Script run (building muscle memory)

Choose a call scenario for the day, booking an appointment, reporting a problem, asking about a bill, rescheduling a delivery, and say your Universal Call Script out loud for that scenario. Don’t read it word for word. Say the skeleton from memory and fill in the relevant details. Do it twice: once slowly and carefully, once at a pace closer to normal speech.

The goal at this stage is not realism. The goal is to make the structure feel physically natural, so that in a real call, your mouth knows what to do even when your brain is busy listening.

Minutes 4–7: Call simulation (realistic pressure)

This is where abblino earns its keep. Run a short role-play in which the agent:

• speaks at normal speed
• asks for your name, reference number, or date of birth
• gives you a date, a fee, or a next step
• asks at least one follow-up question you weren’t expecting

Your job is not to be perfect. Your job is to stay in the call, use your survival phrases when needed, and confirm the key information at the end. If you miss something, use a repair phrase, don’t apologise and don’t panic.

Minutes 8–10: Confirm and close (the professional finish)

Practice ending the call. This sounds trivial but it isn’t, many learners trail off, repeat themselves nervously, or hang up before properly confirming the outcome. Practise these three moves in sequence: one confirmation sentence, one “next step” sentence, one polite close.

• “So I’ve got the appointment confirmed for Thursday the 19th at 10am.”
• “And if anything changes, I should call this same number, right?”
• “Perfect, thank you so much. Have a great day.”

This ending makes you sound competent and organised regardless of how the rest of the call went. It also gives you a written record of what you understood, which you can follow up on if anything is wrong.

Step 5 – Use abblino for Realistic Phone-Call Practice

The reason abblino is particularly useful for phone-call practice is that it can simulate conditions you simply can’t replicate with a textbook or a static phrase list: normal-speed delivery, unexpected follow-up questions, institutional phrasing, hold messages, and fast bursts of information followed by silence. You control the scenario; abblino runs the call. Below are six prompts you can copy and paste directly.

1) General phone-call simulator

“Phone-call role-play: You are a customer service agent at a company I’m a customer of. I’m an expat practising my language skills. Start the call naturally by answering and asking how you can help. Ask for my name and reference number, speak at normal speed, and include at least one unexpected follow-up question. If I use a repair phrase, like asking you to repeat or slow down, respond naturally and continue the call. At the end, summarise the next steps and ask me to repeat them back to you to check I understood.”

2) Appointment booking

“Appointment booking practice: Role-play a call to book an appointment, it could be a doctor, a government office, or a utility provider. Offer me three available time slots fairly quickly. Make one of them a time I should turn down (for example, one that clashes with something). Ask me to confirm the final date and time before ending the call. After the role-play, give me a reusable booking script and five key phrases I could use in the same scenario again.”

3) Tech support – internet or mobile data

“Tech support call: My internet or mobile data isn’t working and I need to report it and get a case number or next step. Ask me troubleshooting questions one at a time, restarted the router? Any lights flashing? Any error message?, and teach me short, natural answers to each. Correct only major errors. After each correction, suggest a more natural version of what I said, and explain briefly why it sounds more fluent.”

4) Voicemail decoding

“Voicemail training: Write me a realistic voicemail message that lasts about 30 to 45 seconds. It should be about a change to an appointment, include a new date, a new time, a callback number, and one action I need to take. Speak it as a continuous message, not a list. Then ask me three questions: what was the new appointment date and time, what is the callback number, and what do I need to do? Tell me which details I got right and which I missed.”

5) Hold phrases and fast information delivery

“Call-centre realism: Start the call, put me on hold for a moment using realistic hold language, then come back and give me a quick burst of information, a date, a fee amount, and a document I’ll need to bring. Speak at normal speed. I will use repair phrases to ask you to repeat or spell things. After the role-play, tell me which repair phrases I used, which ones worked well, and one phrase I could add next time to sound even more natural.”

6) Polite but firm escalation

“Escalation practice: I have a problem that hasn’t been resolved, for example, a refund that was promised but hasn’t arrived, or a repair that was scheduled but didn’t happen. Role-play a polite but firm call where I need to either escalate to a supervisor or get a concrete timeline for resolution. After the role-play, teach me three ways to push for a result without sounding rude or aggressive, with example phrases for each.”

For complementary listening practice outside of abblino, YouGlish lets you search any word or phrase and hear it used naturally in real video content . This is especially useful for hearing how phone-specific phrases, like “hold the line” or “your call is important to us”, actually sound in native speech. Language Transfer is worth mentioning for structural vocabulary groundwork, as it builds understanding of how the language is put together rather than just what phrases to say .

Step 6 – The High-ROI Call Scenarios to Train First

Not all phone calls are equally likely or equally useful to practise. Here are the scenarios that come up most often in expat life and that, once mastered, cover the skills needed for almost everything else. Work through them in roughly this order, one per week:

Booking and rescheduling appointments – doctors, dentists, government offices, car garages. These are probably the most frequent and the most stressful. They involve dates, times, names, and confirmation of what to bring.

Billing questions and payment confirmation – electricity, gas, phone, internet. These involve amounts, due dates, account numbers, and often the option to pay over the phone or be redirected to an online portal.

Delivery issues and package collection – missed deliveries, redelivery windows, collection point addresses. These tend to involve short, fast bursts of information: a date, a time, a location, a reference number.

Internet and mobile troubleshooting – common for new arrivals. Involves technical vocabulary but also very predictable question sequences (have you restarted it? what lights are showing?).

Housing – landlord and maintenance calls – reporting a problem, requesting a repair, confirming an access date. These require a bit more assertiveness vocabulary.

Bank card issues – blocking a lost card, requesting a replacement, booking a branch appointment. These feel high-stakes because they involve financial details, but the actual vocabulary is quite narrow and predictable.

School or childcare administration – absence notifications, meeting requests, school trip permissions. For expat parents, these calls can feel isolating; having a script makes an enormous difference.

Choose one scenario per week and train it every day that week. By the end of the month, you’ll have four scenarios fully in your muscle memory, and the skill set to handle most of what real expat life throws at you.

The Expat Phone Call Weekly Plan

This plan is themed by day so that each session builds on the last rather than starting from scratch.

Monday – Script building. Use abblino to create two call scripts: one for booking an appointment, one for reporting a problem. Write them down. Practise them out loud twice each.

Tuesday – Numbers and dates. Run two short call simulations focused entirely on handling numbers, times, and dates. End every simulation by confirming the key details back to the agent. If you make a mistake on a number, note it and drill that specific digit sequence again.

Wednesday – Voicemail day. Ask abblino to record two voicemails of 30–45 seconds each, on different topics. For each one, write down the key facts (who called, what changed, what you need to do) and then check your notes against the actual message. Focus on getting the action step right, even if you miss some detail.

Thursday – Tech support and troubleshooting. One call simulation for a technical problem, internet, appliance, or delivery. Ask for the next step to be confirmed in writing (email or text). This is also good practice for assertively requesting written follow-up, which is a genuinely useful real-world move.

Friday – Real-life rehearsal. Simulate the exact call you are most likely to need to make in the coming week. Do it twice: first in a simple, cautious version using basic vocabulary; then in an upgraded version where you push for a more natural-sounding delivery. Get abblino’s feedback on the second version.

Saturday – Stress inoculation. Ask abblino to run a “fast agent” simulation, one where the person speaks quickly, uses hold phrases, and gives information in a single burst. Your goal is not to understand everything perfectly. Your goal is to stay calm, use at least two repair phrases, and confirm the most important detail at the end. That’s a successful call.

Sunday – Review and phrase bank. Look back at the week. Pull out ten phrases that actually came up and felt useful. Remove anything overly formal or complex that you wouldn’t realistically reach for under pressure. Do one final two-minute call where you aim to sound calm and natural. Go into next week with a leaner, sharper phrase set.

Common Expat Phone Problems – and Exactly What to Do

“They always speak too fast.”

This is the single most common complaint, and the fix is simpler than it feels: use a repair phrase the moment you notice you’ve lost the thread. Don’t wait until the end of the sentence hoping it will make sense. The phrase “I’m sorry, could you say that more slowly, please?” is completely acceptable to say at any point in a call. Native speakers do it too. After they slow down, confirm back what you heard. You are not being difficult; you are being a careful customer.

“I panic when they ask for my details.”

Prepare your identity block in advance and keep it in front of you during every call. Write down your name and how to spell it phonetically, your address, your customer or reference number, your date of birth, and your email address. Practise delivering this block, not reading it, delivering it, until it takes less than fifteen seconds. When the agent asks for your details, you should be able to give them before anxiety has a chance to kick in.

“I can’t process numbers.”

The problem is almost always that you’re trying to hear and process numbers simultaneously. Instead, repeat the number back immediately, “so that’s 0711 453 281?”, rather than trying to memorise it while it’s being said. This forces the agent to confirm or correct it, takes the pressure off your memory, and means you end up with the right number. Use Forvo to listen to how numbers are said in your target language, the rhythm of number sequences varies significantly between languages.

“I don’t know how to end the call properly.”

Always close in three moves: confirm what was agreed, name the next step, say thank you and goodbye. If you’re not sure what the next step is, that’s exactly when to ask, “and just to check, what should I do if I don’t hear back by ___?”. A clean close is what separates a call that felt uncertain from one that feels resolved.

“I feel embarrassed asking for things to be repeated.”

This one is partly about mindset. Customer service agents deal with unclear calls all day, bad connections, background noise, people who didn’t quite hear something. They are not judging you. And in most cultures, asking for clarification is seen as careful and polite, not incompetent. The embarrassment fades with repetition: every time you use a repair phrase and it works, it gets slightly less scary to use it the next time.

The Call Debrief Loop – Turning Bad Calls Into Future Wins

One of the most effective things you can do after any real call, especially one that didn’t go well, is to spend three minutes debriefing it in abblino. This turns a frustrating experience into reusable material.

Right after the call, while it’s still fresh:

1. Write down three bullet points: what you wanted, what actually happened, and what you still don’t know or didn’t understand.
2. Paste them into abblino with one of these prompts:

• “Here’s what happened on a phone call. Help me rewrite what I said more clearly and naturally.”
• “What should I have asked to make sure I understood the next step?”
• “What’s a better way to have stated my problem in one sentence?”

1. Take the improved version and say it out loud once, immediately.

Your next call on the same topic will feel noticeably easier, because you’ve turned the stress into a script.

If you’re building a vocabulary bank alongside this, Anki is a free and widely used spaced-repetition flashcard tool that works well for locking in call phrases over time . italki is worth considering if you want to complement abblino practice with a live tutor who can run real phone-call simulations with you .

FAQs – How to Handle Phone Calls in a New Language

Do I need to sound like a native speaker on the phone?

No. You need to be clear, polite, and able to confirm key details. That’s it. Many native speakers also ask for things to be repeated, also request written confirmation, and also occasionally mishear a number. The goal of a phone call is not to demonstrate fluency, it’s to get the right outcome.

Is it rude to ask for email or text confirmation?

Not at all, and in many countries it’s increasingly standard practice. Asking for written confirmation protects both you and the organisation. A simple “Could you send a confirmation to my email, just so I have a record?” is professional and sensible. If they say yes, you also get written evidence of what was agreed, which is genuinely useful if anything goes wrong later.

How long before phone calls feel manageable?

If you practise short, focused simulations daily and reuse your call scripts rather than starting from scratch each time, most people notice a real shift within two to three weeks. The change isn’t usually a dramatic jump in fluency, it’s more that you stop losing the thread at the beginning of calls, and you stop trailing off at the end. Once you have the skeleton under your fingers, everything else feels less chaotic.

What makes abblino particularly useful for phone-call practice?

abblino can run a full call simulation, not just a phrase exchange but a realistic conversational arc with unexpected follow-ups, fast information delivery, hold language, and a closing step. It gives you gentle, actionable corrections rather than just marking things wrong, and it can generate reusable scripts based on what came up in the simulation. You can rehearse the same scenario multiple times in a row without it getting repetitive, and you can ask it to increase the difficulty gradually, which is exactly what you need when building a skill under pressure.

Try abblino Today

Phone calls don’t get easier by avoiding them. They get easier when you’ve trained scripts, repair moves, and confirmation habits until they feel as automatic as answering the door. abblino gives you a safe space to build that automaticity, realistic pressure, no real-world stakes, and useful feedback every time.

Start with one scenario this week. Run the ten-minute daily routine. Make “Could you say that more slowly, please?” your default reflex rather than your last resort. Within a few weeks, your next real call won’t feel like a surprise, it’ll feel like a repeat.