Asking someone to repeat in English: everyone does it every 90 seconds

Your coworker in Chicago tells you the delivery date and you miss exactly that one word. You nod, smile, say "okay, great" and hang up without knowing whether she said Tuesday or Thursday. Asking her to repeat it felt like admitting your English wasn't good enough. It wouldn't have.

Asking someone to repeat is one of the most normal things any speaker does, in any language. A team of linguists recorded everyday conversations in 12 languages and found that someone asks for clarification about once every 1.4 minutes. Native speakers do it constantly. What marks you in English isn't asking. It's asking vaguely: a bare What? when you could have asked Tuesday or Thursday?. The specific question costs both of you less and gets you exactly the piece you were missing.

Everyone asks for a repeat, every minute and a half#

Repair is a built-in part of conversation, not a breakdown. Since the classic 1977 paper by Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson and Harvey Sacks, linguistics has described an "organization of repair" that handles recurrent problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. When you say Sorry?, you're using a tool every language comes with.

The exact number arrived in 2015. Mark Dingemanse and colleagues analyzed informal conversation in 12 languages from eight families and five continents, from English, Icelandic and Russian to Lao and Cha'palaa. They counted 2053 cases in 48.5 hours of conversation: a request for clarification about once every 1.4 minutes on average. According to the paper, in none of those languages do five minutes go by, on average, without a repair sequence.

Repair is what keeps conversation working at all. Mark Dingemanse, the study's first author, put it this way in the Max Planck Society press release: "Without such a system, our communication would fail constantly."

The Spanish ¿eh? you use to ask for a repeat has cousins all over the world. In a 2013 study of 10 languages, Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and N. J. Enfield found a nearly identical interjection in every one of them, Spanish included: ¿eh? in Spanish, huh? in English. Even so, the authors stress that each language tunes it its own way and that its exact form has to be learned.

Faking understanding: what every learner does#

Pretending to understand isn't a Spanish-speaker flaw. It's a common move for anyone learning a language. Sachiko Terui interviewed six international students in the US in depth and found eleven reasons for pretending, among them protecting self-esteem, coping with anxiety and keeping the conversation flowing. In her analysis, cultural background had no significant influence; familiarity with the other person and proficiency mattered more. One participant summed it up: "If it is not important, I am just going to pretend that I understood."

Among classmates, asking for clarification is surprisingly rare. Pauline Foster and Amy Snyder Ohta recorded language learners talking to each other and found that they rarely stopped to negotiate meaning. Their conclusion: "Obtaining completely comprehensible input appeared to be of lower priority than maintaining a supportive and friendly discourse."

Letting it go is sometimes the right call. Linguist Alan Firth studied English business phone calls between managers of Danish trading companies and international clients, all non-native speakers, and named the strategy let it pass: the hearer "lets an unknown or unclear action, word, or utterance 'pass' on the (common sense) assumption that it will either become clear or redundant as talk progresses." For Firth this wasn't failure but a competent way to keep the conversation going. And when the unclear word became necessary, the hearer did ask.

The practical rule follows on its own: let the small stuff go and ask when the detail matters. A stray word in an anecdote can wait; a time, a name, a number or an instruction can't.

The more specific the question, the less it costs#

All the languages in the 2015 study share three ways to ask for clarification: the open one (Huh?), the one that asks about a specific piece (Who?) and the one that offers a version for the other person to confirm (she had a boy?). And they all show the same preference. According to Dingemanse and colleagues, people choose "the type that is the most specific possible," a principle that minimizes cost both for the person asked to fix the problem and for the pair as a social unit.

The easiest option for you is the most expensive one for the other person. The same authors explain it this way: "the locally egocentric behaviour for a person performing other-initiated repair would be to choose the simplest form possible (e.g., 'huh?') and let the other do most of the work." The Max Planck press release spells out the costs: a huh? forces a complete repetition, while repeating what you understood and asking for confirmation takes the least effort, at best a simple yes.

In English, that principle becomes a three-rung ladder. Climb as high as what you did hear allows:

• Open, when you caught nothing (noise, two people talking at once, a lapse in attention): Sorry?, Sorry, could you say that again?
• Partial, when you're missing one piece: repeat what you heard and mark the gap. His name is what?, You're meeting who?, You lost me after the address.
• Candidate, when you think you got it: offer your version for them to confirm. Tuesday or Thursday?, So the meeting's at three?

The partial question is perfectly ordinary spoken English. Cambridge's grammar guide calls these echo questions: you repeat part of what you just heard when you didn't fully understand or want to confirm it, often as a statement with the question word at the end (His name is what?) and with rising or fall-rising intonation.

The open question isn't a mistake. The 2015 data show that open forms turn up mostly when there's noise, overlapping talk or distraction. If you heard nothing, Sorry? is exactly the right move. If you heard half, say which half.

The "What?" that sneaks in from "¿Qué?"#

The Spanish speaker's trap is one of form, not attitude: in Spanish you ask for a repeat with ¿Qué? or ¿Cómo?, and in English that comes out translated as What?. It isn't rude, but it shifts the register. Cambridge English Grammar Today explains that what is used to ask someone to repeat something "in informal situations," and next to its example, Sorry, what?, it notes that sorry alone would be more polite. With a friend, What? works. With your boss, a client or a stranger, it can sound blunt.

Sorry? works because it changes whose problem it is. Jeffrey D. Robinson studied American English conversations and put it this way: "the apology-based format (I'm sorry? or Sorry?) communicates a stance that trouble responsibility belongs to repair-initiators, rather than to their addressees." Robinson also flags the opposite risk: without the apology, a repair request tends to imply that the trouble belongs to whoever spoke. With Sorry?, the slip is yours; with a bare What?, you leave open the reading that it's theirs.

Pardon? is the other polite exit. The Cambridge Dictionary lists it as the way to politely ask someone to repeat something you didn't hear, and in the US people also say Pardon me?. Watch your tone: I beg your pardon! said with emphasis signals that something offended you. The combination that works best puts both of this article's ideas together: Sorry, Tuesday or Thursday? carries the social cushion and the precision at once.

Asking well is trainable#

Resolving misunderstandings while speaking is a skill you can train, not a personality trait. Yasuo Nakatani trained 62 female Japanese learners of English for 12 weeks: the 28 who worked on oral strategies significantly improved their oral test scores, while the gains of the 34 in the control group weren't significant. Nakatani credits that result partly to specific strategies, among them maintaining fluency and negotiating meaning to solve problems mid-conversation.

Under pressure, whatever is automatic comes out, and for a Spanish speaker the automatic thing is What?. Does Sorry, Tuesday or Thursday? come out without thinking, or does the ¿Qué? copy slip out before you notice? Tabla has you say phrases out loud until they come on their own, so the specific question shows up before the vague one.

Asking for a repeat puts you in the same company as every native speaker. What sets you apart is saying which part you missed.

Try this today: say Sorry, Tuesday or Thursday? and His name is what? out loud five times each, swapping the day and the name every round, so that on your next call that's what comes out instead of a bare What?.