The B2 Words Nobody Teaches You Before You Move Abroad

There is a strange moment, usually about six months in, when you realise your English is good enough to discuss climate policy and not good enough to explain to a plumber what the noise is. That is not a personal failure. Courses are organised by grammar, and life is organised by errands, so a whole layer of ordinary vocabulary never gets taught to anybody. This is that layer.

These are pinned at B2 not because they are rare but because using them well needs the surrounding fluency of a B2 speaker. A B1 learner can recognise them. A B2 speaker can build a sentence around them under pressure, which is the point.

The general layer is in the free B2 vocabulary list. What follows is the practical layer that sits beside it.

Around the house

This is the group people are most surprised to be missing. You can hold an abstract conversation and still not be able to report what is wrong in your own kitchen.

Word	Where you meet it
draught	cold air coming in around a window or door
damp and mould	the wall problem, and what grows on it
limescale	the white deposit in the kettle and taps
fuse box and trip switch	what you look at when the power goes
boiler and radiator	how most flats are heated
blocked drain	water that will not go down
skirting board	the strip at the bottom of the wall
blind and curtain rail	what covers the window and what holds it

Bureaucracy and money

Administrative English is a dialect of its own, and it is worth treating as one. Every word below appears in letters that carry a deadline, which is why not knowing them is expensive rather than merely awkward.

to be entitled to something
to be liable for something
a deposit, a fee, a levy and a fine, which are four different things
arrears, meaning money you already owe
an instalment, meaning one part of a plan to pay
a rebate or a refund
to apply, to appeal, to lodge a complaint
the deadline, the cut off, the grace period

Words for the social middle ground

The hardest social English is not formal or informal, it is the middle: friendly but not close, polite but not stiff. That register carries a specific vocabulary, and speaking without it makes a fluent person sound either cold or oddly intimate.

Instead of	In the middle
I want to meet	We should catch up sometime.
I am busy	Things are a bit hectic at the moment.
That is bad	That is a bit of a nightmare.
I do not like it	It is not really my thing.
Yes, definitely	Yes, I would be up for that.
I am tired	I am shattered.
It is fine	It will do.
Maybe	I will see how I go.

Complaining without being rude

This is the highest value item on the list, because most people abroad simply absorb bad service rather than risk the language. The English formula is indirect on purpose: soften the opening, state the fact plainly, ask for the outcome directly.

The softening is not weakness. In this register, a direct opening reads as aggression, and the request that follows gets less rather than more.

I am afraid there is a problem with the order.
This is not quite what I was expecting.
I did check before I bought it, which is why I am surprised.
I appreciate it is not your fault personally.
What I would like is a replacement rather than a credit note.
Who would I need to speak to about that?
I would rather sort this out today if we can.
If that is not possible, what are my options?

Vague words that are used constantly

Native speakers are far less precise than a course suggests, and being unable to be vague is its own kind of foreign accent. These are the words that do the work of hedging, and they appear in almost every real conversation.

sort of, kind of, more or less
a couple of, a handful of, loads of
roughly, give or take
to be fair, mind you, then again
or something, or whatever
in a bit, in a while, at some point
to end up doing something
to get round to something

How to collect this layer for yourself

The list above is the common core, but the specific version of it is different for every person, because it depends on your flat, your job and your errands. The people who build it fastest do one thing consistently: they capture the word at the moment they meet it rather than promising to look it up later.

That means the plumber, the letter, the packet and the meeting are all the syllabus. It is a better syllabus than any course, because it is exactly the language your life keeps asking for.

Where MindDory fits

Every word here is a word you have almost certainly already met and lost. Meeting is not the problem; the problem is that nothing brings it back on the third day, when it is about to disappear.

MindDory exists to do that one thing. If you are learning English because you live in it, the page for people who moved to a new country says how the rest of the app is arranged around that.