What is Chatterbox?
Have you ever been stuck for something to say? In a restaurant, in a pub, in a bar, at a family get together, at home, on a date or just a couple of friends bored together. Chatterbox provides conversation starter questions from a wide range of topics suitable for anyone. You can also suggest a question to be added to the chatterbox to make it even better. Anyone whose question is used will be added to the roll of honour on the suggestion page. Chatterbox is also ideal as a source of conversation starter ideas for anyone learning English as a second language.
English As A Second Language (ESL)
It is often said that the best way to learn English as a second language is practice and the best way to practice is for at least two people to have a conversation. Unfortunately as we all know, if you sit down and say OK lets have a conversation, your mind goes instantly and magically blank leaving you sitting there silently looking embarrassed. What you need are conversation starters and we have them. We have hundreds of questions in English all designed to start a conversation. The questions are divided into various topics so that you can find some that interest you.
Why Did We Start Collecting Questions?
One day, we decided to go out to a restaurant for a meal that night. We jokingly said that we would have nothing to say to each other. Let’s face it, we’ve all seen couples sitting silently in restaurants. So we had the idea of taking some random questions from friends and family to serve as conversation starters.
Did It Work?
There was an array of imaginative, interesting and sometimes odd questions which gave us an entertaining evening of conversation and laughter. That evening was also the inspiration for this site.
Developing The Questions
We discovered that the best questions were those that couldn’t be answered with a simple yes / no and that made you think before answering. These were the questions that allowed the conversation to expand and flow. We also discovered that the best questions were those on topics where we were both interested or had experience and so could contribute more to the conversation than otherwise. This sounds obvious and probably is but it had a great influence on the development of Chatterbox.
Why Turn It Into A Web Site?
At the end of the evening, our conversation turned to the topic of conversation itself and how many situations there are where people seem to have nothing to say to each other or just run out of things to talk about.
So we decided to help; to ban the boredom and abolish the embarrassing silence.