USA Chat Rooms: Chat with Americans Online

Open Who's online and set the country to the United States, and you have your answer on screen. The list shows people whose country is set to the United States and who are on the site at this moment, each with a photo and a name. That is what USA chat rooms look like on Tochato: not a lobby with a flag on it, but a list of people you can open a one-on-one chat with. The page on chat rooms by country shows the three taps it takes.

Each card leads to a profile. From there you can follow the person, send a message or start a video call. If you would rather not choose, a random match may pair you with someone in the States too, though random matching does not let you fix the USA or any other country in advance.

In the evening, local time, as with most things people do for fun. The catch is that an American evening is four different evenings. When it is 8 p.m. in New York it is still 5 p.m. in Los Angeles, so the American evening never arrives all at once; it rolls from east to west.

We do not publish traffic figures, so treat this table as a clock conversion and nothing more. It shows what "evening" means in each zone, lined up against Eastern time and against London for visitors from abroad.

You do not need to live there. You might want to talk to someone in America from somewhere else: to practise English, because you are planning a trip, or simply out of curiosity about a country you know from films. The country setting works the same wherever you are.

Timing is the main thing to get right. Use the table above backwards: if you are in Europe, your early morning is the American late evening, and your late evening is their afternoon, when fewer people are free. From Asia or Australia, your daytime lines up with their night.

Do not worry too much about your English. Typed messages can be translated automatically, so you can write in your own language and be understood, and people are generally patient with someone making the effort. Say where you are from early on; it is the easiest opener there is.

Whatever is on the calendar. The United States has a strong shared rhythm to its year, and knowing where you are in it hands you a first question that almost anyone there can answer. This is a rough guide, not a rule.

Small conventions, mostly, and none of them serious. Knowing a handful saves a few confused moments.

The same things they talk about at a bar with a stranger, minus the noise. In US chat rooms a first conversation usually opens with where you are, what you do and what you are watching, and it goes wherever those lead.

The words. American English changes by region, and spotting it is half the fun. None of this is a rule, just a few things that come up often enough to recognise.

Not here. On Tochato you can browse the United States list and start a chat as a guest, with no email and no password. The page on chat rooms with no registration explains what a guest can do and when an account becomes useful.

It is also free to start. The details are on the page about what's free, so they are not repeated here.

The United States is one entry in a longer list. To pick somewhere else, or to see how time zones line up across the UK, Canada and Australia, go to chat rooms by country. New to the site altogether? How Tochato works is a two-minute read.