Japanese small-talk


As long as the conversation I'm having, follows the chapters in Genki I & II
I'm sort of OK but as soon as I try to engage in some small-talk I'm lost!

Sentences like

ロバートさんは, どんなスポーツが好きですか

just sounds dorky!

Please help me with some nice sentences for starting a conversation with
friends, business associates and general acquaintances that doesn't make me
sound like well, reading out loud from Genki I.




You're asking for something that doesn't make much sense. You're looking for
natural-sounding preset phrases that allow you to keep talking without saying
anything.

How do you do small-talk in English? Usual topics for me are weather, local
sports, travel, and food. Pretty much the same thing applies to Japanese.
Sure, we could give you phrases that would start the conversation, but how
would you deal with the reply in any of those cases if you're not sufficiently
comfortable in the language to generate them yourself?

