6 Minute English / The art of conversation

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Sam.

And I m Neil.

Recently I met up with an old school friend who I hadn t seen for years. We talked for hours

It sounds like you had a good chinwag a long and pleasant conversation between friends, which is great because in this programme we re talking about talking. We ll be discussing conservations the exchange of ideas, thoughts and feelings that happens when people talk to each other. And as usual we ll be learning some new vocabulary as well.

With the rise of Twitter and social media, which encourages us to give our opinion on a subject without always listening in return, some think the art of conversation is being lost. But luckily, there are still millions of us who love to talk, chat, chinwag and chatter away. In fact, in 2012 a competition in Latvia broke the world record for the longest telephone conversation. So, Neil, my question is this: how long did this record-breaking conversation last? Was it:a) 24 hours and 4 minutes?b) 54 hours and 4 minutes? or,c) 84 hours and 4 minutes?

Hmmm, I ll guess a) 24 hours and 4 minutes, after which they probably fell asleep!

OK, Neil, I ll reveal the correct answer later in the programme. During a long career, DJ and BBC radio presenter, Nihal Arthanayake, has had conversations with hundreds of people. Now he s used these experiences to write a book entitled, Let's Talk: How to Have Better Conversations . Here Nihal tells another radio presenter, Michael Rosen, of BBC Radio 4 s, Word of Mouth, about the influence of his mother who also loved talking to people in her job as a nurse:

Well, it gave me the sense that you are enriched by listening. And this was of course, pre-social media which has of course encouraged us to project - to transmit - more than receive. So it meant that I guess I was conscious of experiences of others, and wanted to try and understand them. Also, partially, Michael, it was a survival instinct because I was a little brown boy in a predominantly white school, a state school in the 1980s.

For Nihal, good conversation involves listening as much as speaking. By listening we find out things about the person we are talking to which, in turn, help us understand ourselves. This is why Nihal says we are enriched by listening we are improved by having something else added.