Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.
One student showed me a letter she had written in English and then translated, and she had done it the way anybody does in English: drafted the message, decided at the end how formal it had turned out, added a greeting to match.
The first line decides the rest of the letter
In English that works: you add a Hi or a Dear, She adjusted two words, adjusted the tone, and sent it. Her Russian version opened formally and continued casually, and when I read it back to her she heard it immediately. The form of address in the first line set the tone for everything below it, and the rest of the letter sounded like someone who lost their nerve halfway down.
She had not made an error. She had made two letters and sent them as one.
What the opening actually commits you to
Three choices happen in that first line, and English makes none of them, which is why the habit of settling tone at the end has nothing to attach itself to here.You are not choosing a greeting. You are choosing the whole letter.
The address form comes first. Name and patronymic are the standard when you have them, and they are not rigid in that way. Dear Sir It is stiff. This is what a professional letter looks like. The same student spent twenty minutes on her first letter looking for a patronymic that wasn't there. It is not written anywhere: not in a signature, not on a company page. She found it three weeks later in a forwarded thread, and by then she had sent four letters that began Dear Mr. Ivanov with the surname, which had worked perfectly well. Then the verb forms underneath it. The same student pasted a request from an old thread into a formal letter and could not see what was wrong with the result, because every word in it was correct. What had happened was that the request came from a message a colleague had written to someone he knew well, and the Politeness carried within Russian grammar had come with it. And the exclamation mark, which took one of my students most of a year to accept. It looks like I’m yelling at them, he told me. He had been replacing it with a comma in every letter, and he stopped only when a Russian colleague sent him a two-line reply that opened with one and he noticed he had read it as perfectly neutral. That is the standard. Omitting it reads clipped.Four templates that cover most of what you will send
I’ve kept these four in a note for about three years and paste them instead of composing, which is less impressive and has never once caused a problem.| Purpose | Opening and closing |
|---|---|
| First contact | Dear Ivan Petrovich! / Dear Irina Petrovna! … With respect, |
| Reply to a stranger | Hello, Ivan Petrovich! … With respect, |
| Ongoing correspondence | Good day! … With respect, |
| Colleague you know | Ivan, good day! … Thank you, |
Choose the row before you write the body, not after.
It started after I sent a supplier a letter that opened one way and closed another, and got back a reply that was polite in a manner I still remember. When I started teaching families abroad none of these rows existed yet. School Russian was too administrative for a mother in Denver and my ordinary Russian was too close, and for the first two months I wrote every letter from nothing and rewrote most of them twice.
What turned that into a note was counting. Eleven letters in one week, four of them rewritten, and the four had the same problem in the first line.
The subject line nobody teaches
The student who changed her subject lines showed me a screenshot of a thread before and after. English subject lines summarize; Russian ones label, naming what the message is about in a noun phrase without a verb.
Her subject lines used to be sentences. In one lesson, we changed them to noun phrases: Contract for supply, not I am sending the contract. She wrote to me six weeks later from a thread with twenty messages in it, where the labels were the only thing making any of them findable. One student didn’t change anything else about her email habits for two months. People just answer faster now, she said. I have no way to check that and neither does she, so treat it as one person’s impression rather than a finding.The closing I got wrong for six years
My own Russian is native, so this was never a language problem at all, and that is precisely why it took six years instead of six months.
For six years I signed letters to parents Sincerely without thinking about it, because that is what one writes. Then a mother replied to a difficult message of mine and closed with Thank you, and the difference sat there on the screen looking obvious. Sincerely is correct with everybody and warm with nobody, which is exactly the trade a formula makes on your behalf, and it makes it every time.She had been writing to a person and I had been writing to a category.
It had taken a hundred letters and somebody else’s closing line for me to notice, which is a long time to spend being correct with people who were not strangers.A closing formula is the one place where correct and cold are the same word.
Now I use a warmer close with families I have taught for more than a year, which costs nothing and took me six years to think of. At Palme School we teach online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. You can book those here, and there are printable materials for learners in our resource library.Frequently asked questions
With the address form that matches your relationship, and with an exclamation mark rather than a comma after it. Name and patronymic is the standard when you know the patronymic, which with a stranger you often do not; the surname with Mr. or the name from their signature both work.
It is always correct, which is not the same as always right. With people you have worked with for a long time it reads as distance you may not intend.
A noun phrase naming the topic rather than a sentence describing your action. Contract for supply, not sending you the contract.
Not the openings and closings, which follow different conventions, and not the politeness, which Russian carries in places English does not. The body of a factual message usually survives translation intact.
Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Conversation school · Free materials
Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.
