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The first thirty seconds of an English conversation — openers, short answers, and the art of the follow-up question.
With a light opener such as "How's it going?" or "Is this your first time here?" — then answer short and positive, return the question, and follow up with an open question.
Updated: July 2026
A2 · Small Talk · 10 min
A structured ten-slide lesson for A2 learners. Hear a real conversation opener, meet the key opening questions for events, the office and visitors, then practise starting and sustaining a conversation across six interactive drills before a final five-question quiz. The whole arc is under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
Small talk does a different job in English than many German speakers expect. It is not about exchanging information or being witty — it is a signal that says: I am friendly, I am approachable, you can work with me. The questions are deliberately light, and the answers are allowed to be light too. That is exactly why skipping small talk and getting straight down to business can land badly in English: the approachability signal never arrives, and the conversation starts colder than it needed to. In a German office, shared silence — in the lift, before the meeting, at the coffee machine — is normal and often even polite. In an English-speaking setting, the same silence quickly reads as lack of interest. The good news: you do not need to become an entertainer. Two light questions, a smile and genuine listening are plenty. Small talk is a technique with clear building blocks, and this lesson drills exactly those blocks: open, answer, follow up.
For the three most common professional situations you only need a handful of openers. At events and conferences, use questions that literally everyone in the room can answer: "How's it going?" as a relaxed greeting, "Is this your first time at this event?" as a way into the conversation, and "How do you know the host?" whenever there is a host — that question almost always opens a small story, because everyone at the event has some connection to it. At the office, the rhythm of the week carries you: "Busy week?" works on any day, "How was your weekend?" is the Monday classic, and from Thursday onwards you ask "Any plans for the weekend?". For visitors who have just arrived there are two reliable openers: "How was your trip?" right after arrival, and "Is this your first time in Hannover?" — followed by a recommendation for the city if the answer is yes. Learn these questions as fixed chunks, like vocabulary. You do not rebuild them each time; you retrieve them.
A conversation rarely dies at the opener — it dies in the second round. The core technique has three steps. First: answer short and positive. To "How's it going?", "Pretty good, thanks" is plenty — nobody expects a report. Second: return the question, usually with "How about you?" or "And you?". That shows interest and plays the ball back. Third, and most important: ask an open follow-up — a question with "what", "how" or "why" that cannot be answered with yes or no. Instead of "Was your weekend OK?", ask "What did you get up to at the weekend?". Open questions invite a small story, and stories keep conversations alive. Also listen for keywords in the other person's answer — a project they mention, a trip, a hobby — and ask about exactly that. People who ask follow-ups come across as interested. People who only answer come across as polite but closed, and the conversation ends after two sentences.
Small talk runs on a simple rule of thumb: safe topics are the ones where nobody has anything to lose. That covers the weather, travel and journeys, food and restaurants, the city or region, current work projects at a general level, weekend plans, sport and culture. These work with strangers just as well as with colleagues. On the other side are topics best avoided in professional English small talk: salary and money, politics and elections, religion, age, weight and appearance, illnesses, and private relationship questions. Some of these may feel harmless among German colleagues — in an English-speaking professional context they quickly come across as intrusive. Salary is the sharpest edge of all: "How much do you earn?" reliably ends a getting-to-know-you chat. If the other person raises a taboo topic themselves, you do not need to lecture: answer briefly and neutrally, then steer back to safe ground with an open question. The weather is never too banal for that job — that is precisely what it is for.
Two traps come up again and again for German speakers. The first: treating "How are you?" as a genuine question. In English it is primarily a greeting formula, roughly like the German "Na?". The expected response is short, positive, and returned: "Good, thanks — you?" If you answer with an honest report about back pain or stress, you surprise the other person — not because honesty is forbidden, but because the phrase has a different function. The second trap is silence. In German lifts, waiting areas and meeting rooms, silence is normal and nobody feels uncomfortable. In an English-speaking environment the same silence creates pressure: the other person starts wondering whether something is wrong. You do not have to fill the pause brilliantly — a simple "Busy week?" is entirely enough. Add to that the German preference for directness: jumping straight to the agenda saves time, but it skips exactly the moment where trust is built. Budget two deliberate minutes for small talk — they are part of the work, not a detour.
At work, small talk is not a warm-up act — it is part of collaborating. International meetings almost always start with two or three minutes of light conversation while people dial in or sit down; if you use those minutes, you are present in the room before the agenda starts. A few register notes help. "How's it going?" and "What's up?" are casual and suit colleagues; at a first client meeting, "How are you?" or "It's good to finally meet in person" is the safer choice. Names are a tool of their own: a question like "How do you know Sarah?" feels more personal than any generic line, because it shows you are paying attention to the context. A clean exit is part of small talk too: "It was great talking to you — I'll let you grab a coffee" ends a conversation warmly instead of letting it simply collapse. Use these building blocks deliberately for a few weeks, and the first thirty seconds in English eventually run on autopilot — which is exactly the point.
In everyday life, usually not. "How are you?", "How's it going?" and "What's up?" work like greetings — similar to the German "Na?" or "Alles klar?". The expected response is a short, positive answer plus a return question: "Good, thanks — you?" You recognise a genuine enquiry about your wellbeing from the context: one-to-one, with eye contact, and often phrased "How are you doing — really?". Then a longer answer is welcome.
Silence. In everyday German life a quiet minute in the lift or before a meeting is completely unremarkable — in an English-speaking environment exactly that silence quickly reads as cold or uninterested. So the mistake is not saying something wrong; it is saying nothing at all. The fix is small: a single light question such as "Busy week?" or "How was your weekend?" is enough to send the friendliness signal.
Because small talk does not need to be interesting — it needs to connect. The weather is the one topic both speakers are guaranteed to share at that moment, where nobody can get anything wrong and nothing is at stake. That very "boringness" is its strength: it opens the conversation without demanding anything. From there you move on with an open question about travel, projects or weekend plans — the weather is the door, not the room.
The technique is the same; the formulas differ slightly. In Britain you often hear "You alright?" or just "Alright?" as a greeting — that is not a worried enquiry but the equivalent of "Hi, how are you?", and it gets a short "Yeah, good — you?". In the US, "How's it going?" and "What's up?" are more common. Both sets are understood everywhere; what matters is recognising them as greetings and not answering them literally.
Small talk is the entry ticket to every English conversation, which makes it an ideal A2 building block. The natural companion is *answering-the-phone* (A2), because phone calls open with the same greeting rituals. After that, *tell-me-about-yourself* (B1) is the logical next step: when small talk goes well, the question about you yourself almost always follows — and you want to be ready for it. For the typical phrases inside a conversation, *make-do-collocations* (A2) is also useful.
Linguistics has a name for it: phatic communication — language whose job is not to exchange information but to create social connection. The idea was coined by the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who spoke of "phatic communion". Almost every language has such formulas; what differs is where and how much of it is expected. English-speaking cultures expect small talk in queues, lifts and before meetings — German culture permits silence in exactly those places.
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