How do you say "Can you hear me?" in English, and what do you say when the technology fails on a video call?
The standard question is "Can you hear me?" — with hear and see, English works with "can", which is also why it is "I can't hear you" rather than "I don't hear you". The problems have fixed phrases: "You're on mute", "You're breaking up", "Your video is frozen", "We lost you". And so does the repair: "Let me try turning my camera off", "I'll dial back in", "Can everyone hear me now?"
- Check: Can you hear me? / Can everyone hear me? / Can you see my screen?
- Name it: You're on mute. / You're breaking up. / Your video is frozen. / We lost you.
- Fix it: Let me try turning my camera off. / I'll dial back in. / Could you repeat the last part? I missed it.
B1 · Meetings · 10 minTech problems in video calls, taught brick by brick.
A structured ten-brick lesson for B1 learners. Hear a sound problem in context, meet the three toolkits from a tutor — check it, name it, fix it — then practise the phrases in interactive drills before the closing quiz. The whole arc runs in under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
- CEFR levelB1 · Intermediate
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsListening, Speaking, Business English, Writing
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 06
Why tech trouble needs phrases of its own
There is a moment in an English-language video call when the language stops being the problem and the line takes over: your colleague's mouth is moving, but no sound arrives. The picture stands still. The client's voice falls apart into fragments. Professionally you know exactly what should be said — you are simply missing the four or five English sentences that describe it. And because the meeting keeps running, there is no time to build them in your head. That is why these phrases are worth learning the way you learn vocabulary. They are short, they are fixed, and they come back with the same words. This lesson sorts them into three toolkits: sentences for checking sound and picture, sentences that name the problem outright, and sentences that announce a fix and then take you back into the meeting. With those three groups ready, a glitch no longer costs you a minute — and you come across as capable rather than stranded.
02 / 06
Toolkit one: checking sound and picture
The quick check at the start takes surprisingly little English. "Can you hear me?" is the base question; for a group you say "Can everyone hear me?", and when you also want a comment on quality you add "okay": "Can you hear me okay?" The picture works the same way: "Can you see me?" and, as soon as you are showing something, "Can you see my screen?" What matters is the pattern behind it. With the perception verbs hear and see, English generally reaches for "can" rather than the plain present. That is why it is "Can you hear me?" and not "Do you hear me?", and why the answers run "Yes, I can hear you" or "Sorry, I can't hear you." Two short replies to a successful check are "Loud and clear" and simply "Yes, all good." And after a repair the same question comes round again, this time with "now": "Can everyone hear me now?" That small word marks the question as being about the state after the fix rather than before it.
03 / 06
Toolkit two: naming the problem
The four typical kinds of trouble each have their own fixed phrase in English, and the distinctions earn their keep: naming precisely what you notice saves the other person from guessing. "You're on mute" means the microphone is switched off and nothing at all is arriving. "You're breaking up" means the voice is arriving in pieces, with gaps in the middle; a close variant is "The audio keeps cutting out", where "keep" stresses the repetition. "Your video is frozen" describes a still picture while the sound runs on, and "Your video has frozen" says the same thing with an eye on the moment it happened. If somebody has dropped out of the call altogether, you say "We lost you" or, from your own side, "I lost you for a second." And when you only have a suspicion, wrap it politely: "I think the connection is unstable" or "I think it's on my end." That hedging is useful at work, because in the first seconds nobody really knows which side the fault sits on.
04 / 06
Toolkit three: fixing it and picking the thread back up
The third toolkit differs from the first two in its grammar: here you are no longer describing a state, you are announcing an action. "Let me try turning my camera off" is the model line — after "try", the -ing form is what you use when you are testing something out to solve a problem. "Let me try a different network" and "I'll switch to my phone" work the same way. If none of that helps, there is the restart: "I'll dial back in" means you are leaving the call and joining again straight away, and a "Give me two minutes" in front takes the uncertainty out of it for everyone. When you come back, two sentences do the work. The first checks the result: "Can everyone hear me now?" The second collects what went past you: "Could you repeat the last part? I missed it." Watch "missed" here — it means you did not catch it, not that you long for it. "Could you put that in the chat?" is worth having too, because for figures, names and links the chat beats a third repetition.
05 / 06
Typical stumbling blocks for German speakers
Four transfers from German stand out on an English call. The first is the German for "I can't hear you", which comes across word for word as "I don't hear you". The natural English is "I can't hear you": with the perception verbs hear and see, English normally uses "can", because the point is not a habit but whether something is getting through right now. The same holds for "I can't see your screen." The second concerns the German way of saying that a microphone is silenced, which often surfaces as "You are silent" or "You are mute". On a call the phrase is "You're on mute", with that fixed pairing of "on" and a noun, much like "on hold" and "on speaker". The third is the German image of a picture that hangs: English does not hang here, it freezes, so it is "Your video is frozen" or "Your video has frozen". And the fourth is the German for "you're gone": "You are away" suggests absence or being on holiday. On a call you say "We lost you" or "You dropped out." One more small item: the German Verbindung is "connection" here, not "binding" or "compound".
06 / 06
Channel matters: standup, team call, client call
The phrases stay the same; the tone adapts. On a daily remote standup, short is fine: "You're on mute", "Say again?", "Back in a sec" — nobody expects a full sentence, and the brevity keeps the meeting brief. On an ordinary team call you put an apology in front, because you are cutting in: "Sorry, you're breaking up." On a client call the politeness rises one more step and the diagnosis turns into a suspicion: "Sorry, I think the connection is unstable at my end — could you repeat the last part?" With "I think" and "at my end" you take the blame onto your own side instead of pushing it towards the client; it costs nothing and lands much more pleasantly. Two habits help in all three settings. First, say what you observe before you say what you suspect: "I can't hear you" is a fact, "you're on mute" is a guess. Second, practise the sentences out loud until they arrive without thinking. Start with three — "Can you hear me?", "You're on mute" and "I'll dial back in" — and add the rest as you go.