A delivery van, a cyclist, a screech, a crunch — over in four seconds, right in front of you. Nobody's badly hurt, but somebody's insurance will hang on what witnesses say. An officer opens her notebook: 'Talk me through what you saw.' Now the hard part: being accurate in a second language, about four seconds of chaos.
The rarest kind of speaking: where the goal isn't to be interesting, persuasive or fluent — just precisely, boringly true.
You were waiting to cross by the bakery when it happened: a white delivery van turning right, a cyclist coming through, brakes, a shout, and a bike on the tarmac. The cyclist is up and swearing — shaken, scraped, alive. The van driver is pale. Traffic is stopped, and a police officer, PC Webb, is working through the bystanders.
Here's what nobody teaches you about being a witness: your brain has already written a story. It has decided who was at fault, filled the gaps with guesses, and stamped the whole thing "what I saw". The officer doesn't want the story — she wants the fragments you can actually stand behind: where you stood, what you saw first, what you heard, what you'd swear to and what you wouldn't. A witness who says "I can't swear to that part" is worth ten who are confident about everything.
And in a second language there's a quiet extra pressure: the temptation to simplify your account into something easier to say. Resist it. The phrases in this lesson exist so that precision never has to be sacrificed to grammar.
Here's your toolkit. You don't need to memorise it. Read each phrase, say it out loud once, and pick the ones that sound like you. You'll have it open while you practise.
Draw a card and say what you'd say, out loud, in one or two sentences. Use your own words or the toolkit. Then peek at one possible answer.
Done a few rounds? Try again with the toolkit covered. When it flows, you're ready to hear them in a real conversation.
The pavement outside the bakery. The cyclist is being checked over; PC Webb turns to you.
From memory — don't scroll back up.
No script this time. You'll have a real conversation with a real person. They have their own mind, and you have a goal.
Say each step once, out loud, in your own words. No writing, no peeking at the phrases.
Pick your situation. Your partner plays the other person.
🏆 You win when the statement is accurate and you are comfortable signing it.
Start the scene first. Partway through, draw a card. Whatever it says, it just happened.
Now you're on the other side. Your partner takes your old part.
Draw another twist whenever you like.
Tick what you actually did, in either seat.
Run it one more time. Draw a twist before you start, and try to reach a good result faster than before.
In Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, testimony killed people. Nineteen were hanged on the strength of what witnesses said they had seen — girls pointing across a courtroom, neighbours recalling spectres in doorways, assumption piled on assumption until it weighed as much as fact. Almost none of it was lying, which is the terrifying part. The witnesses believed themselves. Their stories had simply eaten their observations.
The turning point came when a few people began doing the modest thing this lesson teaches: separating what they knew from what they had concluded. Ministers who asked how, exactly, a spectre could be identified. Jurors who later signed a public confession that they had convicted "on evidence we now know we could not understand." The trials collapsed not through drama, but through the arrival of the question "what did you actually see?"
Your traffic statement will hang nobody. But it lives on the same blade: the space between witnessed and assumed is where other people's futures get decided — a licence, a claim, a job. "I can't swear to that part" is a small sentence. Salem is what the world looks like when nobody says it.