Conversation Skills: Saying NO 🙅‍♂️ "No can do" and more! 😣

Hi everyone. It's Jennifer here with another lesson to help you boost your

conversation skills in English. If you find these lessons helpful,

I hope you'll remember to like them and also consider sharing them with others.

My goal is to reach as many learners as possible, and you can help me do that.

Well, in this video we'll consider ways to say no. Is it easy for you to do that?

It can be hard to say no to

requests and invitations because we don't want to hurt other people's feelings or appear rude or uncaring.

But the simple truth is that we can't say yes to everything.

Often we don't say no directly to an invitation.

We express that we want to say yes, but something is stopping us from doing so.

We say...

Notice how we can add a thank you or an apology to our refusal.

Often the thing that prevents us from accepting an invitation is another commitment or other plans.

In that case, we can say...

For example

You can also explain that you have other plans without giving specific details

Again you can always tag on your thanks or "thanks for thinking of me."

If you're declining an opportunity to join some kind of activity either in your personal or professional life,

you can say rather casually:

As for a request for help, there can be a variety of reasons for your refusal.

Most often we're just too busy. I think if you speak with kindness then your refusal should be accepted.

Here are some suggestions

When people say they don't have to bandwidth for something, they're saying they're not available.

They don't have the ability to take on something else.

A very informal expression is "no can do."

It means it's impossible for me to do what you want.

This is a flat-out refusal. And as I said, it's very informal. So be careful how you use it.

All the examples that I've been sharing are conversational.

Refusing or declining in more formal English would require other structures such as...

We could have a funny lesson on rude refusals,

But I'll hold off on that for now. I think if you feel the need to

respond with a strong refusal to a ridiculous or

inappropriate request,

then it's probably better to

walk away and not even dignify that kind of request with a response.

Okay, let's look again at some of the key expressions from this lesson

Well, we'll end here. Please remember to like this video and subscribe if you haven't already.

As always, thanks for watching and happy studies!

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