The Family Circus

It's hard to believe that I have only three or four weeks before I leave for Russia. According to what my school has told me, my new Letter of Invitation should be ready tomorrow, after which it will be sent to me and I will be able to reapply for my visa. All of this should take until the end of the month and, knock wood, I will be out of here in early May.

Quite a few things still need to be done before I can depart. One of the biggest is that I need to start digging through family photographs for good pictures of my nearest and dearest. One of the classic ESL/EFL lessons is to teach words for family members using the teacher's own family photos, on the theory that students are naturally interested in the teacher. So I need to be prepared for this exercise, as I expect I will have to go through it at one time or another.

Teaching words for members of the family, as I know from experience, can be quite challenging for an ESL/EFL teacher. Many cultures do not conceive of family relationships in exactly the way we do. My faithful correspondent Leah Silberman Jenner remarked in a comment to my last blog post that Yiddish has words for your children's in-laws. When I took my CELTA course in New York, I witnessed a lesson by another trainee about the family. One very vocal student from Turkey could not believe that English, unlike Turkish, does not have single words to distinguish aunts and uncles on your mother's side from aunts and uncles on your father's side. It took several trys for this trainee to pacify his disgust over the issue.

I do not yet know how Russian treats in-laws, stepfamilies, or cousin relationships, which I gather are the areas where languages tend to differ the most (even within English, there are differences; in some places, people will refer to almost all relatives beyond their immediate family as their cousins). I have gotten only as far as the words for father, mother, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, grandmother, and grandfather, and so far, Russian conceives of these relationships in the same way that English does. About the only pecularity so far is that some of the Russian words for male relatives have feminine endings in the nominative singular but are nonetheless declined as masculine nouns.