von Christine Burgmer | Sep. 23, 2026 | Sparks |
A feedback or feedback? The word English never counts. You said it in the meeting and everybody understood you. „We had a nice feedback from the client.“ Nobody corrected you, because nobody needed to. The meaning arrived intact. The only snag is the...
von Christine Burgmer | Sep. 22, 2026 | Sparks |
Fluency isn’t speaking fast At some point you decided that fluent means fast. So you speed up. And the faster you go, the less you sound like yourself. You don’t take the second you needed. The easy word comes to you after the sentence is over. You finish...
von Christine Burgmer | Sep. 21, 2026 | Sparks |
Ms, Mrs or Miss, and why you don’t need to know Before you sent a two-line email, you went looking for clues. Mrs or Miss. Her LinkedIn photo was not helping. It’s a small thing that stops you for a minute. Getting it wrong feels rude, and there’s no...
von Christine Burgmer | Sep. 18, 2026 | Sparks |
Sorry, can I just jump in here? Interrupting in English. It’s not rude. It’s a doorbell. The English ring it first. „Sorry, can I just jump in here?“ Nobody is actually sorry. It’s a polite noise that means „I am about to speak...
von Christine Burgmer | Sep. 17, 2026 | Sparks |
More vocabulary won’t fix this You knew the word. You used it an hour ago, in the car, with nobody watching. Then someone asks you a question and the room goes quiet in that particular way. You reach for the word. It’s half a second late. Nobody notices....
von Christine Burgmer | Sep. 15, 2026 | Sparks |
We bought a paper map We got lost on our bikes in northern Germany a few weeks ago. Not properly lost. Just not entirely sure where we were. My children would have used an app. We had a paper map, so we took several wrong turns. We stopped, looked, guessed, turned...
