Meetings
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The first two minutes set the tone of the whole meeting — and they are built from fixed, learnable phrases.
With three fixed moves: a friendly opening signal with a welcome ("Right, let's get started — thanks everyone for joining"), one sentence stating the purpose ("We're here to…"), and a pointer to the agenda ("There are three items today").
Updated: July 2026
B1 · Meetings · 10 min
A structured ten-slide lesson for B1 learners. Hear a natural meeting opener in context, meet the three stages — welcome, purpose, agenda — from a tutor, then practise them across six interactive drills before a final five-question quiz. The whole arc is under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
The opening of a meeting is the moment the room decides who is actually steering. A hesitant start — an uncertain "ehm, so… maybe we start?" — tells everyone that nobody is holding the wheel, and the rest of the discussion often drifts accordingly. A clear start, by contrast, costs you three sentences and changes the whole dynamic. The good news for you as a learner: this opening is not free speech. It is built almost entirely from fixed phrases that you can assemble like bricks — a starting signal, a thank-you to the participants, one sentence about the goal, a pointer to the agenda. At B1 level you do not need to improvise any of it. If you control these formulas, you will sound more assured in the first two minutes than many native speakers who stumble into the room unprepared. That is exactly why these few sentences are worth drilling until they come automatically: they are the one part of the meeting you can fully control before the real discussion starts.
English meetings almost always begin with a short signal word that ends the small talk and opens the official part: "Right," "OK," or "Well." The actual opening formula follows immediately. The three you need most are "Right, let's get started," "Thanks everyone for joining," and the friendly question "Shall we begin?". You can combine all three: "Right, thanks everyone for joining — shall we get started?" is a complete, natural opening in a single line. The welcome stage also covers introductions: when there are new faces, you say "I'd like to welcome Maria from the Hamburg office," or you introduce yourself with "For those who don't know me, I'm Thomas and I look after marketing." Tone matters here: friendly and direct, not ceremonial. Thanking the room is standard and reads as considerate — especially when people have joined early in the morning or from another time zone. But this first stage never needs more than two or three sentences.
After the welcome, the room expects an answer to the unspoken question: why are we here? Two fixed patterns do this job. The more formal one is "The purpose of today's meeting is to…," followed by a verb: "…to agree on a launch date," "…to review the budget." The shorter, more informal one is "We're here to…": "We're here to plan the next release." Both patterns force you into a single, clear sentence — and that is exactly their strength. Then comes the agenda. "As you can see from the agenda…" points everyone to the document in front of them; "There are three items today" counts the points. Counting is more than politeness: it hands the participants a map and hands you a steering tool, because later you can switch cleanly with "Let's move on to item two." Watch the vocabulary here: the list of points is the "agenda," and the written record of the meeting is the "minutes" in English — the German "Protokoll" is not a "protocol." With the purpose stated and the agenda shown, your opening is complete, and item one can begin.
In video meetings the core pattern stays identical — open, purpose, agenda — but a small technical stage slots in before it. Because participants arrive in a trickle, the standard first-minute line is "Let's wait a minute for the others to join." It fills the waiting time gracefully and signals at the same time that you are in charge. Once you begin, the tech checks follow: "Can everyone hear me OK?" before you speak at length, and "Can everyone see my screen?" before you present. These questions are fixed formulas — learn them word for word, because home-made variants like "Do you all look at my screen?" immediately sound like literal translation. Also useful is the friendly "You're on mute" when someone speaks with their microphone off — one of the most common sentences in online meetings anywhere. After that, you run the same three stages as in a physical room: "Right, I think everyone's here — thanks for joining. We're here to review the quarterly numbers. There are three items on the agenda." Once you own the pattern, you switch effortlessly between in-person and online meetings.
Three traps come up again and again with German-speaking learners. First, the literal translation of "Lasst uns anfangen" as "Let us start": grammatically correct, but conspicuously stiff in a meeting — the full form "let us" sounds solemn, almost ceremonial. In a meeting, native speakers use the contraction "let's" almost exclusively. Second, the false friend "eventually": the German "eventuell" means "perhaps" and translates as "possibly" or "maybe." English "eventually" means "in the end, after some time." Someone who says "We can eventually meet on Friday" is not announcing a possible meeting but a certain one — just later than hoped. In scheduling talk, this mix-up causes genuine misunderstandings. Third, register: German business culture tends to run more formal in meetings, and many learners carry that into English — "Dear colleagues, I would like to officially open our meeting" sounds like a parliamentary session to English-speaking ears. In internal meetings, a relaxed "Right, let's get started" is not impolite; it is the norm. Directness with a smile does the job that formality does in German.
The phrases in this lesson cover two situations, and the difference lies less in the words than in the selection. In an internal team meeting, the short forms are enough: "Right, let's get started," "We're here to…," "Three things today." The more familiar the group, the leaner the opening can be — a weekly team update needs no formal welcome. For external occasions — clients, candidates, senior management — you pick the longer variants of the same building blocks: "Thank you all for joining us today," "I'd like to welcome…," "The purpose of today's meeting is to…". Note that even the formal register stays far plainer than its German counterpart — nobody "solemnly opens the session" in English. A reliable compass is to ask whether everyone in the room would be on first-name terms: if yes, use the short forms; if no, use the long ones — but never more than that. When in doubt, start one notch more formal and relax as the meeting goes on; the reverse journey is much harder. With that compass and the three stages of this lesson, you are equipped for practically any meeting opening in English.
Grammatically, "let's" is simply the contraction of "let us" — but in use they are worlds apart. "Let's get started" is the normal, friendly suggestion that opens meetings. The full form "Let us start" sounds solemn and stiff, closer to a sermon or a ceremony. So for meetings: always the contraction. If you need more formality, switch the phrase ("Shall we begin?") rather than expanding the contraction.
Because "eventually" does not mean "eventuell." English "eventually" means "in the end, after some time" — it says something will certainly happen, just later. German "eventuell" means "perhaps" and translates as "possibly" or "maybe." So "We can eventually meet on Friday" promises a meeting instead of leaving it open. In scheduling talk this is one of the most consequential false friends there is. The correct version: "We could possibly meet on Friday" or simply "Maybe we can meet on Friday."
As a future form, "shall" has indeed largely disappeared from everyday English — "I shall go" sounds elevated to antiquated today. But in suggestion questions with "we" or "I" it is alive and well: "Shall we begin?", "Shall we move on?", "Shall I share my screen?" are completely natural, polite meeting sentences. That is the surprising part: the same word that feels dusty in statements is the most elegant option in these questions. So file "shall" as a question tool, not as a future tense.
The building blocks are the same, but the colouring differs. British openings often reach for "Shall we make a start?" or "Right, let's crack on" — question-"shall" is far more common in the UK. American openings tend toward "Let's go ahead and get started" or "Alright, let's dive in"; to many American ears, "shall" sounds formal or distinctly British. You will be understood with either variant anywhere. If you are learning for European exams or a European business context, the British pattern is the safe choice.
This lesson opens the meetings sequence at B1 level. If fixed conversational formulas still feel difficult, *answering-the-phone* (A2) is a good stepping stone — it drills the same principle in shorter dialogues. The natural next step after this lesson is *agreeing-disagreeing-english* (B1): once the meeting is running, you need to agree, disagree, and invite opinions. And *tell-me-about-yourself* (B1) extends the introduction lines from this lesson into a full self-presentation.
In this position, words like "Right," "OK," and "Well" are not adjectives or answers but discourse markers: small signals that mark the shift from one section of talk to the next. A "Right" at the start of a meeting carries almost no content — it simply says: the small talk is over, the official part begins now. German uses similar signals like "So!" or "Also gut." The interesting part for a learner: these markers rarely carry their dictionary meaning, yet they are decisive for whether your chairing sounds natural.
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