How to Make Small Talk: A Practical Guide for Teenagers and Young Adults

Let's talk about conversation starters. Most of the lists you will find online are full of questions that no real person has ever said out loud, which is why they don't help. Every line below is something you could actually say to somebody, in a real place, without feeling like you are reading off a card.

I have spent more than a decade coaching people through this, and the sentence I hear most often is "I never know what to say first." So here are the words. Take the ones that sound like you and ignore the rest.

If you are both stuck somewhere

This is the easiest opening there is, and most people walk past it several times a day. If you are stuck in the same line, the same classroom, the same waiting room, or the same delayed bus, you already have something in common and you are both a little bored. That is most of the work done for you before you open your mouth.

• "Do you know if this line usually moves this slow?"
• "Have you had this teacher before?"
• "Is this seat taken?"
• "Did you understand what she wanted for the assignment? I read it three times."
• "How long have you been waiting?"
• "Is it always this cold in here, or is it just me?"

Why do these work when they are so ordinary? They work because they are not really questions. They are an offer. You are telling the other person that talking is allowed here, and most people are relieved when somebody else goes first.

If it is your first day somewhere

New school, new job, first week of college, first night at a club you just joined. Almost everybody around you is in the same position and almost nobody says anything, so the person that speaks first tends to get remembered.

• "Is this your first year here too?"
• "Do you know where the science building is? I have walked past it twice."
• "What made you sign up for this one?"
• "Where are you coming from?"
• "I don't know anybody here yet. I am [your name]."

That last one does more work than it looks like it does. If you say plainly that you don't know anyone, you are not confessing to something embarrassing. You are describing a situation that half the room is also in, and you are usually giving somebody permission to say "me neither."

If you have seen them before but never spoken

This is the one people put off the longest. You have been in the same class or the same shift or the same gym for weeks, the window for a natural introduction feels like it closed, and now saying anything seems strange. It is not strange. Simply name the situation out loud and it stops being awkward.

• "I have been meaning to say hi for about a month. I am [your name]."
• "You are in my chemistry class, right?"
• "I see you here every Tuesday. Do you always come this early?"
• "We have been sitting near each other all semester and I still don't know your name."

People often assume the other person has noticed how long it took and is judging them for it. They almost never are. Most of the time they had been meaning to say something too.

If you are at a party or a gathering

Parties feel harder than they are, because everyone looks like they arrived with somebody. Plenty of them didn't, and standing near the food is a reliable place to find them.

• "How do you know [the host]?"
• "Have you tried the thing that looks like a brownie? I need somebody to go first."
• "It is loud in here. Want to move where we can actually hear each other?"
• "You look like you are hiding from someone. I respect it."
• "Is there anyone here I should meet?"

That last one is quietly one of the best lines on this page. It is friendly, it flatters the other person a little (you are treating them as somebody that knows things), and if they answer it you have just been handed an introduction to a third person.

If you want to get past small talk

Once a conversation has been going for a few minutes, you can usually move it somewhere more interesting. These are the questions that turn a polite exchange into an actual one, and they work best after the ordinary stuff has already warmed things up.

• "What have you been into lately?"
• "What is something you are weirdly good at?"
• "What is the best thing that has happened to you this week?"
• "What would you do all day if nobody was paying you?"
• "What is something you have changed your mind about?"
• "What are you avoiding right now?"
• "What is the last thing you got genuinely excited about?"

If you use one of these and the other person lights up, you have found their passion, and you probably will not have to say much for the next ten minutes. That is not you failing to hold up your end. People enjoy talking about the thing they love, and they tend to enjoy the person that let them.

If it is over text

Text is harder than it looks, because you don't have a shared room to point at. The trick is to bring a reason with you instead of opening with nothing.

• "Random question. Do you know anything about [thing they know about]?"
• "This reminded me of you." (with a link, a photo, or a screenshot)
• "How did [the thing they mentioned] end up going?"
• "I am trying to decide between two of these and I have no idea. Opinion?"

Remembering something somebody told you last week and asking about it is one of the warmest things you can do, and it takes about eight seconds.

The part that matters more than the starter

Now the honest bit. The opener is the easy part, and if you are stuck on which words to lead with, you are stuck on the smallest problem in the conversation. Any of the lines above buys you roughly ten seconds. What you do with those ten seconds is the actual skill.

The first thing to do after they answer is to say something about their answer before you ask anything else. If you ask "how long have you been waiting?" and they say "about twenty minutes," don't fire off another question. Respond to what they said. "Twenty minutes? I would have given up." Now it is a conversation and not an interview.

The second thing is to give something back without being asked. Most people answer a question and then wait, so if you volunteer a small piece of yourself, you take the pressure off them to carry it. "I have had this teacher before, he grades hard but he is fair." Two sentences, and you have handed them four things they could ask you about.

And keep asking until you find the thing they care about. Most first answers are polite and shallow because the person has not decided yet whether you are actually interested. If you stay curious for another question or two, you usually get to something real.

A few honest caveats

Keep in mind that some of these will not fit you, and using a line that does not sound like your own mouth is worse than using a boring one that does. If "you look like you are hiding from someone" is not how you talk, don't say it. The ordinary openers at the top of this page work perfectly well and they work for everybody.

Keep in mind too that some conversations simply will not go anywhere, and that usually has nothing to do with you. People are tired, or late, or in the middle of a bad week. If somebody gives you a short answer and turns away, that is an answer, and the right move is a friendly "no worries, have a good one" rather than a second attempt.

And the first few times you do this, it will feel mechanical, like you are operating your own personality with levers. That is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is what learning anything feels like before it becomes normal.

Where to start this week

Pick one line off this page. Just one, from the first section, because those are the lowest-stakes ones there are. Use it somewhere ordinary this week, a checkout line or a hallway or the few minutes before practice starts. You are risking about ten seconds, and nobody is going to think about it afterwards except you.

Then do it again a few days later. The reason this gets easier is not that you find better words. It is that your brain slowly collects evidence that talking to people is not dangerous, and it can only collect that evidence from you actually doing it. Plenty of people that were completely sure they could not do this are proof that it works.

If the part that trips you up is what comes after the opener, that has its own guide: how to start a conversation covers the whole shape of it, and how to keep a conversation going picks up when a chat runs dry.