Meeting the Family in English: A2 Phrases for the First Visit
A first visit to the family of your partner is the hardest easy conversation in a language. The grammar is A2 and the topics are ordinary, but everything happens at speed, several people speak at once, and every question is about you. Preparation helps more here than in almost any other situation, because the questions are genuinely predictable. There are about twenty of them, and they are the same in every country.
This one is pinned to A2 rather than B1 because the difficulty is not the language. It is the speed, the number of people, and the fact that you are being assessed while you answer. A2 grammar is enough for every sentence below. What is missing for most people is having them ready rather than building them.
The general A2 layer is in the free A2 vocabulary list. What follows is the part that only happens in somebody else's living room.
The doorway
The first ninety seconds are almost entirely fixed phrases, which is good news: they can be learned as blocks. Say them slightly slower than feels natural and they will sound calm rather than rehearsed.
- It is really nice to meet you at last.
- Thank you for having me.
- I brought something small, I hope you like it.
- Should I take my shoes off?
- Sorry, I did not catch your name.
- Your home is lovely.
- Can I help with anything?
- Please tell me if I am in the way.
The twenty questions you will be asked
Families ask a small and stable set of questions. Learning the answers rather than the questions is the trick: you will hear these in many different shapes, but you only ever have to produce one version of each answer.
| The question | An answer you can prepare |
|---|---|
| Where are you from exactly? | I am from a small town about an hour from the capital. |
| How long have you been here? | I moved here in March, so about eight months. |
| How did you two meet? | We met at work. She was training me, actually. |
| What do you do? | I work in logistics. Mostly planning deliveries. |
| Is your family still back home? | Yes, my parents and my sister. I see them twice a year. |
| Do you like it here? | I do. The winters are hard, but I like the people. |
| Is the language difficult for you? | Some days. I understand much more than I can say. |
| Are you going to stay? | That is the plan for now. We will see. |
At the table
Eating together is where most of the visit happens, and it has its own small vocabulary. The important thing is to be able to accept and refuse without either sounding rude or ending up with a fourth helping you did not want.
- This is delicious. What is in it?
- Just a little for me, please.
- It is very good, but I am really full.
- Could you pass the water, please?
- I do not eat meat, but everything else is fine.
- May I have the recipe for this?
- Thank you, that was the best meal I have had in weeks.
- Let me help with the dishes, please. I insist.
The rescue phrases
You will lose the thread at some point. Everybody does, including native speakers in a room of eight people. What matters is having a way back in that does not stop the conversation.
The wrong move is to nod and hope. The right move is one short sentence that puts the ball back with them, and all three below do that.
- Sorry, that was too fast for me. What was the last part?
- I know that word but I cannot find it right now.
- How do you say it when someone ...?
- I understood most of that. He went where?
Words about family that are easy to get wrong
Family vocabulary is taught early and then never revisited, so it fossilises. These are the ones that most often come out wrong at A2, and getting them right makes you sound considerably more comfortable than you feel.
| Say | Not |
|---|---|
| my partner | my friend, when you mean partner |
| my brother in law | the husband of my sister |
| my nephew and my niece | the son and the daughter of my brother |
| my parents in law | the parents of my partner |
| my cousin | my cousin sister or my cousin brother |
| my older sister | my big sister, in most contexts |
| my grandparents | my grandfathers, for the pair |
| a close family | a near family |
Leaving well
The end of the visit is the part people remember, and it is four sentences long. Saying them properly is worth more than the whole afternoon of careful listening that came before.
If some of the mistakes above felt familiar, the common mistakes at A1 and A2 covers the wider set that tends to travel with them.
- Thank you so much. I had a really nice time.
- Sorry about my English. It gets better after a few hours.
- I hope we see each other again soon.
- Next time you should come to us.
Where MindDory fits
The reason these phrases fail in the room is never that they were hard. It is that they were met once and then not again until the moment they were needed. MindDory exists to close exactly that gap: you keep the ones you stumbled on, and they come back on a schedule until saying them costs you nothing.
If you are learning a language because somebody you love speaks it, the page about learning the language of your partner is the closest thing to a description of why this app was built.