Monday Morning — Technical English: Debugging Vocabulary

Good morning! Start your week strong with today’s technical English session. We focus on debugging — one of the most important concepts in software development.

Word of the Day: debug

IPA Pronunciation: /diːˈbʌɡ/

Vietnamese meaning: gỡ lỗi — tìm và sửa lỗi trong code

Quick tip: Say it in two parts: “dee” + “bug”. The stress falls on the second syllable: dee-BUG.

Cambridge Dictionary: debug — Cambridge

Hear it spoken: YouGlish — debug

Example Sentences

  1. “I spent three hours trying to debug the login function before realising I had a typo in the variable name.”
  2. “Our team uses console logs and breakpoints to debug issues in production environments.”
  3. “She learned how to debug Python scripts by reading error messages carefully and isolating each function.”

Vocabulary Table: Debugging Phrases

PhraseVietnameseExample
breakpointđiểm dừng (trong trình gỡ lỗi)“Set a breakpoint on line 42 to pause execution and inspect the variable.”
stack tracedấu vết ngăn xếp / chuỗi lời gọi hàm”The stack trace showed the error originated in the database connection module.”
error lognhật ký lỗi”Always check the error log first — it usually tells you exactly what went wrong.”
hotfixbản vá nhanh”We pushed a hotfix to production at midnight to stop users from being locked out.”
regressionlỗi hồi quy (lỗi xuất hiện lại do thay đổi code)“The new feature introduced a regression that broke the payment flow.”

Pronunciation Guide: Breaking Down “debug”

Let’s go sound by sound:

SoundSymbolExample wordYour mouth
dee/diː/“tea”, “see”Tongue behind upper teeth, long “ee” sound
buh/bʌ/”but”, “sun”Short, open vowel — lips come together for “b”
g/ɡ/“get”, “go”Back of tongue touches soft palate

Full word: /diːˈbʌɡ/ — stress on the second syllable

Practice Sentence — Read 3 Times Aloud

“The senior developer spent the morning trying to debug the API endpoint.”

Read it slowly first, then at normal speed, then try to say it naturally without pausing. Focus on the “-bug” stress each time.

Exercise 1: Fill in the Blank

Choose the correct word from the box to complete each sentence.

Word box: debug / breakpoint / stack trace / regression / hotfix

  1. “After the deployment, QA found a _______ that broke the search feature that was working perfectly last week.”
  2. “I added a _______ on line 89 so I could inspect the value of userId before it got passed to the database.”
  3. “The _______ showed that the crash happened inside the parseJSON() function called from fetchUserData().”
  4. “The team had to _______ the app for two hours before they found that a missing semicolon was causing the build to fail.”
  5. “Management asked us to ship a _______ immediately because the checkout page was down for all users.”
Show Answers
  1. regression
  2. breakpoint
  3. stack trace
  4. debug
  5. hotfix

Exercise 2: Translate to English

Translate these Vietnamese sentences into natural English. Use the vocabulary from today’s lesson.

  1. “Tôi cần gỡ lỗi hàm này — nó trả về kết quả sai.”
  2. “Nhật ký lỗi cho thấy server bị lỗi kết nối lúc 3 giờ sáng.”
  3. “Chúng tôi đã đặt điểm dừng để kiểm tra giá trị của biến trước khi nó được gửi đi.”
Show Answers
  1. “I need to debug this function — it is returning the wrong result.”
  2. “The error log showed that the server had a connection failure at 3 AM.”
  3. “We set a breakpoint to inspect the variable’s value before it was sent.”

Note: Your answer does not need to match word for word. Focus on using the vocabulary naturally and making grammatical sentences.

Idiom of the Day: “squash a bug”

Meaning: to find and fix a software bug — to eliminate an error in code

Vietnamese: tiêu diệt một lỗi — tìm và loại bỏ lỗi trong chương trình

This idiom treats bugs like insects that need to be “squashed” (crushed). It is very common in developer conversations and commit messages.

Examples

  1. “We finally squashed the bug that was causing random crashes on iOS devices — it turned out to be a race condition.”
  2. “Before we release version 2.0, we need to squash at least fifteen known bugs from the backlog.”

In a commit message: fix: squash bug in user authentication flow

Build your technical English listening skills with these YouTube channels:

Fireship — youtube.com/@Fireship Fast-paced, high-quality videos on modern dev tools, frameworks, and debugging concepts. Great for learning technical vocabulary in real context. Watch his “X in 100 seconds” series — short sentences, clear pronunciation, heavy on terminology.

Traversy Media — youtube.com/@TraversyMedia Brad Traversy explains complex topics in a slow, clear American English accent. Perfect for intermediate learners. His project-based tutorials show how developers talk through problems — including debugging — in a natural way.

Suggested video to watch today: Search “Fireship debugging” or “Traversy crash course” on YouTube and watch one 10-minute video with English subtitles on.

Daily Challenge

One small action to practice today:

When you hit your next bug at work, narrate your debugging process in English — out loud or in writing. For example:

“OK, the function is returning undefined. Let me set a breakpoint here and check what value is being passed in. The stack trace shows the error comes from line 47…”

Even just a few sentences counts. The goal is to make technical English feel natural in your workflow, not just in study sessions.

Good luck today! Come back at noon for the next session.

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