How do you make an appointment in English on the phone?
In three moves: propose a time as a question ("Would Thursday at ten work for you?"), answer the proposal fully — accept, or decline plus a counter-proposal — and read the slot back at the end ("So that’s Thursday the twelfth at ten.").
- Propose, respond, confirm — three moves, one appointment.
- Time prepositions: at + clock time, on + day or date, in + part of the day.
- A bare "no" is not an answer — the counter-proposal belongs in the same turn.
A2 · Telephoning · 10 minMaking appointments in English, taught brick by brick.
A structured ten-slide lesson for A2 learners. Hear a real proposal in context, meet the three moves — propose, respond, confirm — from a tutor, then practise them across six interactive drills before a final six-question quiz. The whole arc is under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
- CEFR levelA2 · Elementary
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsSpeaking, Listening, Vocabulary, Pronunciation
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 06
What arranging an appointment actually involves
Arranging an appointment is not a grammar problem; it is a small, fixed choreography of three moves — which is exactly why it can be mastered completely at A2. Move one: you propose a time, and you propose it as a question. Move two: the other person answers, either accepting or declining with an alternative. Move three: one of you reads the agreed slot back in full. Skip the third move and you get the double bookings everyone knows from working life: one diary says Thursday, the other says Friday, and both people are certain. On the phone every visual aid disappears — there is no shared calendar on a screen — so the confirmation loop is the only check you have. The good news is that each of those three moves has two or three fixed formulas that native speakers use again and again. You do not have to invent anything; you only have to reach for the right brick at the right moment.
02 / 06
Move one: proposing a time
In English a time is proposed, not announced, and the question form is where the politeness lives. "Would Thursday at ten work for you?" is the everyday office default; "How about Tuesday morning?" is a shade more casual, "Does Friday suit you?" a shade more formal, and "Shall we say two o’clock?" pushes a proposal that is nearly an agreement. "Are you free on the twelfth?" belongs to the same family. What matters is what travels alongside the time: the preposition. Clock times take "at" (at ten, at half past two), days and dates take "on" (on Thursday, on the twelfth), parts of the day take "in" (in the morning, in the afternoon). As soon as the weekday sits directly in front, it flips back to "on": on Thursday morning. The best way to learn those three small words is not as a rule but as part of the whole phrase — keep "at ten" and "on Thursday" in your head as blocks and you will choose correctly under pressure. Offering a second option ("…, or is Friday better?") also makes it easy for the other person to answer honestly.
03 / 06
Move two: accepting, declining, counter-proposing
A proposal has three possible answers, and all three follow the same pattern. Acceptance is short: "That works for me." or "Perfect, I’ll put it in the diary." A decline has two parts, and the second one matters more: the softener first, then the alternative immediately. "I’m afraid I’m tied up then — could we say Friday instead?" or "I’m not free then. How about Wednesday afternoon?" A bare "no" does not count as a complete answer in English; it sounds blunt, and it leaves the conversation stranded instead of moving it forward. The counter-proposal is the repair, and it belongs in the same turn. Watch, too, that the alternative keeps its verb: not "Suits you Thursday?" but "Does Thursday suit you?", and not "Can you Thursday?" but "Can you do Thursday?" And when you accept, you can pin the slot down in the same breath: "Perfect, I’ll put it in the diary."
04 / 06
Move three: confirming the day, date, time and place
The third move costs five seconds and saves whole weeks. You read the agreed slot back in full: "So that’s Thursday the twelfth at ten, in your office." The usual openers are "So that’s…", "Just to confirm…" and "Let me read that back to you," and the usual closers are "I’ll send you an invite." or simply "See you then." Watch the order: weekday, then date, then time, then place — largest unit to smallest. The date is spoken with "the" plus an ordinal: the twelfth, the twenty-third. And always say the month as a word, never as a number: written 12/08 is 12 August to a British reader and 8 December to an American one. Say "the twelfth of August" or "August twelfth" and the ambiguity is gone. Reading a written date out as a pair of digits does not help either: "twelve, eight" is not something the other end can reliably decode. Far from sounding over-careful, that read-back loop is what professional English sounds like.
05 / 06
Typical mistakes German speakers make
Four habits carried over from German reliably produce crooked scheduling sentences. First, "Termin": one German word covers three English ones. An "appointment" is a booked slot with a professional, or with a client coming to you — doctor, dentist, lawyer. Between colleagues the ordinary words are "meeting" or, on the phone, "call": "I’ve got a call with Berlin at four." Saying "I have an appointment with my team" makes your team sound like your dentist. Second, "einen Termin machen": there is no "we make a meeting." The verbs are arrange, set up, schedule and fix — "Let’s arrange a meeting.", "Can we set something up for next week?" Third, "Zeit haben": "I have time on Thursday" is grammatical but off-register for a diary; native speakers say "I’m free on Thursday" or "I’m available." Fourth, the 24-hour clock in speech: "at fourteen o’clock" is wrong, because "o’clock" pairs only with one to twelve. Say "at two", "at two p.m." — or, in timetable register, "at fourteen hundred." And keep the prepositions straight: not "on ten o’clock," not "at Thursday."
06 / 06
"Half ten" and other British–American differences
One expression regularly costs German-speaking learners a whole hour: "half ten." In informal British speech it means half past ten — 10:30, exactly one hour later than German "halb zehn." It is a British colloquialism and is not standard in American English, so when you are the one proposing, say "half past ten" or "ten thirty" and nothing can go wrong. When you hear it from a British colleague, you now know what it means — and if in doubt you simply confirm back: "So that’s ten thirty?" Elsewhere the two varieties differ in tendencies rather than rules. Spoken dates lean British as "the twelfth of August" and American as "August twelfth," and both forms are understood everywhere. Even the calendar has two names: British speakers put a meeting "in the diary," Americans "on the calendar," because in the US a diary is where you write your feelings. Cambridge exam materials use the British conventions as their default model.