IT English: Vocabulary, a Roadmap, and How to Follow Meetings

You read English documentation all day. Stack Overflow, changelogs, error messages, a third-party API's spec — you read them straight through, no translation needed. Talking with colleagues, you throw in English constantly: deploy this to staging, merge that branch into main, fix the last bug then release. Your IT vocabulary isn't missing anything.

Then the company takes on a project for a foreign client, or the team adds a few people in a different time zone. A fifteen-minute standup over Google Meet. The person on the other end says exactly three sentences about what they did yesterday, and you catch about half of it — not because the words are unfamiliar, but because the whole sentence "I'm gonna pick that up after the retro but I'm kinda blocked on the staging creds" goes by in four seconds, even though you recognize every single word.

This article is written for exactly that gap. First, four spots where your ear tends to miss things, plus a standup transcribed word for word, pointing out where sounds get swallowed. Then, IT-specialized English vocabulary organized into five groups you actually use: team roles, agile process, code review, infrastructure and operations, interviews and CVs.

• Why you can read it but can't keep up listening
• What English sounds like in a standup meeting
• Learning to listen, not just to read
• Misheard words, mispronounced sounds, and being afraid to ask again
• IT English vocabulary by group
• A learning path and self-study resources for IT people
• Frequently asked questions

Why you can read it but can't keep up listening

Many Vietnamese developers already have the written form down: reading documentation and error logs every day means the terminology has been lodged in your head for a long time. What makes you stumble in a meeting is usually on the sound side, and there are four spots for that.

The most obvious one is abbreviations read out letter by letter: PR, QA, CI, CD, API, SLA. On screen they're distinct; spoken, they stick together into one short burst of sound — "the PR" at normal speed slips by in half a second. CI and CD differ by exactly one final sound, PR and MR differ by their first sound, and missing one sound means you understand something else entirely without knowing you slipped. Then there are the ones read like real words: k8s is "kates", i18n is "eye eighteen en", a11y is "ally".

Next are everyday words that carry a fixed meaning in the industry: ship, block, park, nit, smell, debt, spike, freeze, groom. You know the original meaning, so your ear isn't on guard. Someone says "let's park that," your brain translates it as parking a car first and only corrects itself after, and while it's correcting, the next sentence has already gone by.

Then there's indirect meeting-room phrasing: "I might be missing something here", "just a small nit", "can we take this offline". Translated word for word they sound harmless; the real meanings are, in order, I think this part is wrong, a small comment that doesn't block the merge, and let's discuss this separately rather than continuing here. It's the same layer of convention as office English, except in a technical team it's denser and directly affects whether you have to fix your code or not.

Last is sounds getting contracted and running together: gonna, wanna, lemme, kinda, "could you" turning into /kədʒə/. This is called connected speech, and it's not unique to technical meetings — it's just that standups are spoken fast with short sentences, so sounds get swallowed more densely. If you yourself are used to pronouncing every word distinctly, your ear also has a harder time recognizing the contracted form when someone else speaks.

What English sounds like in a standup meeting

Put those four spots together and this is what it sounds like. The passage below is an ordinary standup, transcribed exactly as people say it, not as they'd write it in a ticket.

• Tech lead: "Okay, let's get started. Nam, d'you wanna go first?"
• Nam: "Yeah. Yesterday I finished the migration script, today I'm gonna pick up the retry logic. No blockers."
• Linh: "I'm still on the payment bug. I'm kinda blocked on the staging creds, I pinged infra yesterday but I haven't heard back."
• Tech lead: "Lemme check with them right after this."
• Huy: "Quick one. My PR for the caching layer's been sitting for two days, could somebody take a look?"
• Tech lead: "I'll get to it this morning. It's mostly nits from what I saw."
• Linh: "Also, are we still shipping Thursday, or has that moved?"
• Tech lead: "Still Thursday as far as I know. Let's wrap, I'll follow up in the channel."

Eight sentences, about forty-five seconds, all words that are familiar to people in the trade. The table below picks out seven spots where the ear commonly slips, one type for each.

The middle column shows the common thread: none of the words are hard. Migration, retry, staging, caching, layer are all words that sit in the code you write every day. What gets lost is the boundary between words and the swallowed final consonants.

The cost is very concrete. Mishear "nits" as "needs" and you think your PR is being asked for major fixes when it's about to be approved. Mishear "I haven't heard back" as "I have heard back" and you think Linh already got a reply from infra, when she's actually stuck and needs someone to push on it.

So the spot that needs practice is the function words, not the specialist terms: "has", "could", "for", "of", "have", and the /d/ or /t/ sound at the end of past-tense verbs. That's where a sentence's meaning lives, and it's exactly what speakers glide over fastest. Try replaying a recorded meeting and transcribing only these words to see how many you catch.

Learning to listen, not just to read

The default advice for specialized English is to learn more words. For IT people, what's usually needed is attaching the written form you already know to the sound it's actually spoken as, and reading through another list of four hundred words doesn't solve that, because a word list trains the eye, not the ear.

What trains the ear is listening and transcribing: listen to a sentence, write down exactly what you hear word for word, then check it against the original. Passive listening lets the brain guess to fill in the gaps, and you never know where you just missed something. Transcribing puts the gap right there on the screen.

Try it with Linh's exact sentence above: "I'm kinda blocked on the staging creds." If you write it down as "I'm kind of block on the staging credits," then in a seven-word sentence you've already exposed three listening errors: the contraction "kinda," the final consonant cluster in "blocked," and the shortened word "creds."

WELE is built around exactly this method, called listening dictation: listen to each sentence, transcribe it, and the system grades it and points out exactly which words you got wrong. The specific process is in the article 5 steps to effective listening dictation.

One thing worth saying plainly: the best content for you to practice with isn't necessarily IT content. Tech podcasts speak fast and are full of terminology you already know, so you finish listening feeling like you understood, but part of that is you inferring from domain knowledge rather than actually hearing it. WELE's podcast library is split into levels, and the right level to start at is one where you transcribe about eight out of ten correctly.

If you're not sure where you stand, take the listening level test first, then pick your content. If you want to check your vocabulary specifically, there's the vocabulary test, though vocabulary scores usually come out higher than listening ability.

Short, regular sessions are usually easier to sustain than one long session crammed into the weekend, especially when your schedule is already full and weekends are rarely free. How to fit this into an already-packed day is in the article learning English 15 minutes a day.

Misheard words, mispronounced sounds, and being afraid to ask again

Taking "nit" as harsh criticism. In code review, "nit" is an unspoken convention: a small comment, doesn't block the merge, fix it or leave it, your call. Many Vietnamese engineers see this word and immediately fix everything and apologize in the comment, when the reviewer was only flagging a minor point for completeness. Conversely, "I have some concerns" sounds polite but is much heavier than a nit.

Thinking LGTM means the code is perfect. It only means the reviewer didn't see anything big enough to block on, and often they've skimmed it. If you want someone to look closely at a part, you have to say so directly: "Could you take a proper look at the concurrency part?"

Mixing up deploy and release. Deploy means pushing code to an environment; release means opening a feature up for users to see. Many teams deploy several times a day but release weekly, so in an incident call, mixing up these two words means the other person misunderstands what just changed.

Mispronouncing the vowel in estimate. The noun is /ˈestɪmət/, with the final vowel reduced to a schwa; the verb is /ˈestɪmeɪt/, with a clear, long final vowel. Say "my estimate was wrong" with the verb's vowel and it sounds off right away, and this mistake is common because Vietnamese doesn't shift vowels by part of speech.

Staying silent when you can't keep up. This isn't a language mistake, it's a habit. One short sentence is all it takes: "Sorry, could you say that again?" or "I didn't catch the last part." In many teams, nobody holds it against you for asking once, but they will notice a task done wrong because you just nodded along.

IT English vocabulary by group

The rest of the article is a reference table. IT-specialized English covers a lot of ground, and learning it from an alphabetized list is wasted effort because you won't encounter these words in that order again. The five tables below are organized around five situations you go through in a work week, with examples that are all sentences people in the field actually say or write. Skim through once, then come back to look things up when you need them.

Team roles and structure

Agile process and meetings

This is the set of words you hear most every day, and also the set most often glided over.

Code review and code quality

This group has a lot of unspoken conventions; mishear one word and you end up fixing more than the reviewer wanted.

Infrastructure and operations

During an incident, people talk fast and clipped, so this set of words needs to already be in your ear.

Interviews and CVs in IT

A learning path and self-study resources for IT people

The path for someone already working fits into three stages.

1. Stage one: reading documentation is already fine. Every day, take a passage from docs you already read, read it aloud, then look up the pronunciation of three words you've never heard anyone actually say.
2. Stage two: being able to follow a meeting. Every week, take about a minute of dev conversation, listen sentence by sentence and transcribe it, then open the transcript to check.
3. Stage three: interviewing in English. Prepare answers to three commonly asked questions: introduce yourself, a project you're proud of, a time you messed something up. Record yourself until you can say it smoothly without looking at notes.

For self-study resources, pick something that teaches the craft while also giving you real English, ideally with a transcript on hand to check against.

• MDN Web Docs (developer.mozilla.org): written in complete sentences rather than bullet points, so you pick up phrasing as well. The Learn web development section is the easiest place to start.
• freeCodeCamp (freecodecamp.org): a nonprofit, completely free, publishing constantly. Articles are written in full prose, so you run into the exact phrases you'll hear in meetings.
• Syntax.fm: the hosts are all devs, talking casually, full of contractions just like in a standup, and there's a transcript for every episode so you can grade yourself.
• Talk Python To Me (talkpython.fm): an interview format, so the pace is slower than a news podcast, with a full transcript and timestamps, good as a stepping stone.
• The Changelog (changelog.com): guests come from many countries, so your ear gradually gets used to accents that don't match the textbook, and the transcript clearly marks who's saying which line.

Any source works, as long as real people are speaking and there's a transcript to check against.

Frequently asked questions

What is "lập trình" called in English?

This question usually means: what do you call "lập trình" in English. Lập trình is programming, sitting down to write code is coding, someone in this profession is a programmer or software developer, and the whole area of English for this work is called English for IT. Knowing these names is useful when you're searching for material, because the good material usually sits under the English keyword.

Does IT-specialized English need advanced grammar?

Not much. Communication in a technical team runs on short sentences, mostly simple present and simple past tense. What gets you misunderstood is usually pronunciation and word choice, rarely relative clauses.

Should you learn IT vocabulary from long lists or by situation?

By situation. The five tables above are organized that way for the same reason: you recall a phrase by remembering the context it appeared in, not its position in the alphabet. The article learning vocabulary through context explains this in more detail.

Do you need to train a proper American or British accent?

No. In a distributed team, Indian, Singaporean, German, or Australian accents show up just as often as the textbook-standard accent. The realistic goal is to speak clearly and to be able to understand many accents. Pick one accent to practice transcribing with to get your ear used to it first, then expand from there.

How long does it take to follow a standup without having to ask again?

It depends on your current listening foundation, so there's no common benchmark. Someone who already listens well to everyday English gets used to the pace of meetings within a few weeks; someone who still struggles with slow, deliberate sentences needs to build a foundation first, which takes months. The simplest way to track progress is to record a meeting every month, transcribe it, and count how many spots you still miss.

Does IT vocabulary need to be learned with phonetic transcription?

For words you've only read but never heard anyone say, yes, because pronunciation guessed from spelling is often wrong: cache is /kæʃ/, queue is /kjuː/, then tuple, schema, null, and a string of library names. The pronunciation column in the five tables above is for looking these up exactly when you need them. Look it up once, then hear it again in a real sentence, and it usually sticks.

The set of words in this article are phrases that repeat in a standup, a retro, and a code review round. What's left is attaching them to the real sound, and that happens when you listen and then transcribe. The specific method is at the listening dictation method. If you work in a different field, the roundup article specialized English has core vocabulary for many other fields too.