Episode 6 - How was your weekend? - English Conversation Starters

In this episode I expanded on a question from a learner. He wanted a way to start a conversation in the minutes while he and his colleagues waited for everyone to enter the room for a meeting. In this episode we will cover: How was your weekend? How are you? How's it going? How you doin'? Did you have a good weekend? What did you do over the weekend? Did you do anything nice over the weekend? How are you holding up? How are you going? (Hello Australia!) What have you been up to? I mentioned Joey from Friends and his famous line, 'How you doin'?' In the video below you can see Joey try this ...a lot! And you can also see some of the answers he gets. I'd keep this one for close friends. I talked about closed and open ended questions. Closed ended questions means those that can only be answered with yes or no. 'Do you want to go for dinner?' Open ended questions are those that get a bit more information. 'What do you want for dinner?' When trying to start a conversation try to use more open ended questions. Vocabulary Idiom - 'pad this out' - to pad something out - to provide more information to support an idea Phrase - 'for the most part' - just another way to say 'generally' Idiom - 'I didn't sleep a wink' - I didn't get any sleep at all. genre - different categories of story, used for describing movies, books and TV shows. For example: comedy, horror, romance, action, sci-fi Idiom - 'Don't, for heaven's sake' - 'for heaven's sake' can be used in two ways: either to strengthen an original idea (like this) or as a curse. In this case I'm using it to mean 'really really don't'. As a curse it's usually used alone. If your mother gets angry at you she might say 'Oh! For heaven's sake!' Which will hopefully make you stop what you're doing.