How to Apologize in English (When You've Made a Mistake)

Hey, it's Annemarie with Speak Confident English.

What would you do if you got an email from your boss because you missed a really

important meeting? You knew about the meeting,

but unfortunately you put it on the wrong day on your calendar,

so you totally missed it. What would you say?

You might panic and start to feel worried, or you could simply say,

I'm sorry,

but there's a much better process for how to apologize when you've made a

mistake in English and you can do it gracefully.

That's exactly what I'm going to help you do in today's lesson. Plus,

you're going to learn some fun idioms and some really surprising words that we

use in English to talk about mistakes, so be sure to keep watching.

[inaudible]

Very quickly, before we get started, if you find this lesson useful to you,

I would love to know,

and you can tell me by giving it a thumbs up on youtube and subscribing to this

channel so you never miss a future Confident English lesson.

But now let's get started with how to apologize when you've made a mistake in

English.

Step number one when you're apologizing for a mistake is to admit that you've

made the mistake. And this is actually the hardest part.

None of us like to admit that we've made a mistake.

We want to believe that it's always other people,

but if we don't admit to the mistake,

if we try to hide it or cover it up,

it usually leads to much bigger problems and it comes back to bite us in the

end. I love that idiom.

It will come back to bite us in the end.

That means that if you don't deal with it now,

it's going to cause much bigger problems later.

The good news is mistakes are so common that we have a ton of different words

that we use to talk about them and some of them are pretty surprising.

So when you have to admit to a mistake, you could say something like,

I've messed up, I've slipped up,

I've fudged up.

Other options are,

I've mucked that up or simply I've made a mistake and that one might be the best

for a business professional situation.

Now if it was a really big mistake, you might hear someone say,

that was an epic fail.

That was a disaster or that was totally my fault,

and honestly,

those are just a few of the things we say when we talk about admitting to a

mistake. If you want to get my full list,

I've got all of those for you in the online lesson and I'll leave a link to that

just below this video. Once you've done that,

the second thing that you need to do is apologize. Now,

of course you could use the words, I'm sorry,

but there is something that native speakers do to show how sorry they are to

give real meaning and emotion to it.

We usually add a word like really so genuinely or truly,

and we stress it. Listen to how I say it.

I'm so sorry. I'm genuinely sorry.

I'm truly sorry.

What do you notice about how I said those words so genuinely and truly I

stressed them.

What I mean by stress is that I'm saying those words a little bit louder,

clearer,

and I'm stretching or lengthening the vowel sounds to show some additional

emotion. I'm so sorry.

So here are two examples and you tell me which one sounds better.

I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

A couple more examples that are fantastic for using at work are.

I really want to apologize for that.

Notice that I stressed the word. Really.

I hope that you can accept my apology or please accept my sincerest apologies

once you've apologized. Step three is to briefly explain what happened.

And the key word there is briefly,

you don't need to give all the details or tell a long story.

You can keep it really simple and say something like,

I didn't mean for that to happen.

It was an oversight on my part or that wasn't what I intended.

And finally in step four,

you should end with what you're going to do to fix the mistake.

It might be something that you've already started to do.

Maybe you're doing it right now to resolve the problem or it's what you plan to

do in the future.

And here are a few ways that you could express those different possibilities to

make up for it.

I'd like to notice the use of the phrasal verb to make up,

to make up for something means to resolve it or fix a problem to make sure that

doesn't happen. Again, I'm going to,

I've already started to take care of this and finally I'm working to fix this by

tomorrow or by next week.

Now you've got four steps and language you can use for apologizing when you make

a mistake in English. The thing that you can do is practice it.

So I want you to think about that situation at the beginning where you missed an

important meeting because you put the wrong date on your calendar.

How would you respond to your boss in that situation?

If you want,

you can even share your example with me in the comments just below this video,

but now I want to share with you how I would apologize in that situation.

Oh my gosh, that is completely my fault. I am so sorry.

I know that the meeting was coming up, but I had it on my calendar for tomorrow.

I know that it was an important meeting,

so I'm going to call our partners who were there so that I can get caught up and

make sure that we know everything we need to know.

I can assure you that this won't happen again.

I hope that you'll share your example with me so that I can give you feedback

and so that you can get more comfortable using this language if you want even

more practice with the language that you've learned in this lesson today.

I've got additional examples,

situations that might happen in real life so that you can practice apologizing

when making a mistake.

Plus if you'd like help with other difficult situations in English.

I've got a full playlist for you on Youtube.

It includes lessons on how to deal with uncomfortable questions or rude

comments.

Don't forget you can subscribe to this channel so you never miss a future

Confident English lesson.

Thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing you next time.