The English you meet abroad belongs to Lagos, Dublin and Manila, not to the recordings.

Twenty seconds each, and the word that matters is the one that got swallowed.

• Border control and the purpose

  Purpose of visit, how long, where are you staying, who is paying for the trip. Short questions, asked flatly by someone who has asked them all morning — and the trouble is rarely the answer, it is catching the question.

• The chemist, or the drugstore

  Naming a symptom takes body vocabulary you have never said aloud, plus a tense English insists on: it has been hurting since Tuesday, not it hurts since Tuesday. The shop is a chemist in Britain and a drugstore in America.

• Announcements you cannot see

  Station tannoys, aircraft cabins and bus drivers compress everything: platform alterations, replacement bus services, gate changes. Nothing is repeated, nothing is written down, and the vowels belong to whoever is holding the microphone.

• The landlord, the boiler, the double charge

  The booking is wrong, the heating is off, the card was charged twice. A phone takes away the gestures and the menu you could have pointed at, and English expects a complaint to stay polite while it stays firm.

• Accents that are not the textbook

  Glasgow, Newcastle, Cork, Mumbai, Singapore, rural Queensland — your course recordings are one accent out of dozens, and rhotic and non-rhotic speakers hand you different vowels for the same word. Nobody slows down unless you ask them to.

• First floor is not the first floor

  In Britain it is one flight up; in America it is the one you walked in on, and a lift is an elevator on the way there. Nothing here is wrong, but the wrong one at the counter buys you the question a second time.

Catching the question is most of it; the answer is usually three words.

Vocabulary is not what runs out. What runs out is the handful of moves that keep a transaction going after you have missed half of what was said.

• Getting something repeated without sounding cross: sorry, could you say that again is polite; say that again on its own is not.
• Prices and times as they are spoken — half four, quarter past, a fiver, twenty quid, two-fifty — which rarely match the written form.
• British indirectness: that's not ideal means no, and I'm afraid we're fully booked is the whole refusal.
• Questions in a hurry, with the auxiliary intact: is there a later one, does this go to the centre, can I pay by card.
• Spelling and confirming aloud: your surname, a postcode, a booking reference, over a counter or a bad phone line.
• Talking to another non-native speaker, which is what most English abroad actually is, at a receptionist's speed.

No scripts for the airport

You need some English already; this is not where the language starts. There is nothing here to memorise either — a rehearsed line gets you as far as the counter and no further, because what defeats people is whatever comes back, in whichever accent happens to be standing there. If a list of sentences is what you want, a phrasebook costs less.