Name: Soft / Polite English Phrases To Criticise Without Being Rude | Improve English Speaking By Michelle
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T09:13:01.000Z
Duration: 12 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Whether you're a teacher, a student or a Businessman you cannot go about without criticizing people.

The superlative

Criticism is one of the most important thing that we do in our daily life. But it's not

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a really good idea to be very harsh when you're criticizing, so therefore today I have got

some very useful phrases for you that you can use when you're criticizing someone. But

all of these phrases will help you, soften the criticism which means that you can criticize

but at the same time not hurt anyone. So how useful is that gonna be for you? So keep watching

this session with me, my name is Michelle.

Now here we have a set of phrases with us

that we are going to use to soften the criticism. The first phrase that we have is, “I have

to say…” Alright, so this is a kind of phrase that you will use when you think that

what you're going to say, may make someone upset or it could annoy someone. For example,

if you tell someone that you didn't like their performance, maybe one of your employees,

if you didn't like his performance, you could say, “I have to say, but your performance

was quite disappointing.” This way, when you say it, it's not very harsh and you've

made your point also. You also have an alternative to this which is, “I'm bound to say…”

I'll write it for you here. This contraction is short for ‘I am’ and when you're speaking,

you don't speak the full words you say, ‘I'm’. So, “I'm bound to say that your performance

was pretty disappointing.” So here you're making your comment and the other person will

not feel too bad although you've made your point. The word ‘bound’ means same as

‘have’, which means that it's a necessity. So it's a necessity that you have to make

your comment and criticize the other person. Right, now with this we look at the next phrase

and this is, “with respect”. So this phrase is used when you want to disagree with someone

and criticize them. So if you're speaking to your boss and your boss asks you to do

something unreasonable, ‘unreasonable’ means that something which is not fair and

which is not correct. So if your boss tells you to go online and post false comments about

him like, ‘oh, he's such a great boss’ etc., etc. So that's obviously not fair, isn't

it? So if you want to reply that person you could say that, with respect or “with all

due respect Mr. Davis, I think your request is quite unreasonable.” So here you're giving

a lot of respect to the person but you're also criticizing and putting your point across.

So ‘with respect’ or ‘with all due respect’, this phrase is used to disagree with someone.

When you don't agree with what they have asked you to do. Okay, now here we have the next

phrase and this is, “to say the least”. Okay so the word ‘least’ talks about the

quantity of something and least, another form of least is ‘less’, this is a superlative

which means as the maximum form of less. So if you have had a very bad experience and

you want to put it briefly, it means that maybe you want to tell how bad it was but

you don't put it out straightaway but you want to put it in simple words and you’re

telling the least about it. So let's say you had a really bad and uncomfortable flight,

the crew did not treat you well, they do not hear you, when you press the bell and when

you needed something, they didn't get you and even the flight was quite rocky… so

in that case you could say, “I must say I had a rather uncomfortable flight, to say

the least.” So here you are using the word uncomfortable whereas your experience was

way too extreme, it was uncomfortable, they didn't hear you, they didn't pay any attention

to you… So “to say the least” is used when you're talking about an extreme experience.

There's another alternative to it and that is, “to put it mildly”. ‘To put it mildly’,

‘mild’ means ‘soft’ or a lesser version of something. So if you want to tell something

that happened with you in a lesser quantity or in a lesser intensity you could say, to

put it mildly. Alright, now with this we move to the next phrase, “shall we say”. When

do we use this? So, ‘shall we say’ is usually used in the middle of a sentence,

in the middle of a sentence. This is used to make a statement sound less offensive.

So maybe you're participating in a training and you think that the experience the workshop,

the training workshop is quite boring, but you don't want to say it out loud and very

clearly, you don't want to sound very outright, so that's when you will use this phrase in

the middle of the sentence. You could say, “the training is, shall we say quite dull”

which means that you're not enjoying it, it's very boring. So ‘shall we say’ is usually

used in the middle of a sentence to make it sound less offensive and less rude. Okay now

here we are at the next phrase and this is, “don't get me wrong”. So as you can guess

it, you don't want someone to get you wrong, which means that you want them to get you

right. This means that you want them to understand the point of your comment. Let me give you

an example, if your boyfriend asks you to meet his girlfriend and maybe three of you

went out together, you met her but when you come back he asks you for an opinion about

her, like what do you think about Katherine, what do you think? Did you like her? And you

would say, “don't get me wrong, I really like Katherine as a person but I don't think

she's right for you.” So here you want your friend to focus on the second part which is

that you don't think that, Katherine is right for your friend, however you think that she's

a great person. So ‘don't get me wrong’ is used when you want someone to understand

the point of your comment. To understand the point of your comment. So you want someone

to get you right and to not get you wrong. Okay the next phrase we have is, “how shall

I put it…” So this phrase is similar to ‘shall we say’ but it's not used essentially

in the middle of a sentence or you can even use it in the beginning of a sentence and

you know, it's actually made a spoken so that you know your comment is not very rude and

at the same time if you're saying something honest, if you're being honest about something,

you don't want anyone to get hurt or you don't want them to feel bad, so that's how you use,

“how shall I put it, but I think Katherine is a little difficult to get along with.”

So here you're trying to be honest while not trying to be rude. So this one is used to

be honest  and you could also say, “shall I put it

this way that Katherine is a bit rude.” So you can obviously say, ‘shall I put it

this way’, so you could either say, ‘how shall I put it…’ or ‘shall I put it

this way…’ that Katherine is a bit difficult to get along with. Now we have the next phrase

and that is, “without wishing to”. So this phrase is used when you are going to

tell someone something that they may not like. So we always say it with ‘hurt’, with

the word ‘hurt’. So you could say, “Without wishing to hurt your feelings, I think you

should lose some weight.” So here you're making a comment that someone may not like,

obviously if you're telling someone to lose their weight, they'll not like it at the first

instance but there later on they might think that what you said is correct, so you could

say ‘without wishing to hurt your feelings’. Here you're trying to be soft, gentle and

mild. You're trying to not hurt someone's feelings and making it very clear that my

intention is not to hurt you but I think you should lose some weight. Now we look at the

last phrase that we have for the day, “to be fair”. So sometimes we meet people who

may have done something incorrect or you know recently performed bad but maybe they're a

really good employee and recently they performed bad, so for that person you will use, ‘to

be fair’ in the middle of a sentence to talk about their good qualities while criticizing

them. So if you're making a negative comment and you also tell their quality, that's when

use to be fair. An example of this would be, “Vicky's performance this time was quite

poor but to be fair he's a very good employee.” So like this you're giving him a compliment

and you're still criticizing this will make them feel much better. So ‘to be fair’

is used when giving a compliment with criticism. We also have another alternative to this and

that is, ‘to give someone their dues’. ‘Dues’ is something that you have not

yet paid. The same way if you have not paid a compliment to a person you can do it right

now when you're criticizing them. You could say that, “though she never calls me but

to give her, her dues she always remembers my birthday.” So you criticize the fact