How to 'cheng hu' your various relatives!

Addressing relatives is super super complicated.  There's no such thing as 'Uncle' in fact.  It's really complicated - like 'Uncle number 6 on the mother's side'.  But worse.

 

And to make matters worse, in China it seems when people refer to their 'sister' or 'cousin', they really mean their close friends.  What?  Like, Vera says her 'di di' is studying with her, in fact she means her younger male cousin.  Or when I say my cousin works with me in the office, like 4 months later people go 'oh she's your Cousin', because they assumed that just meant we were close friends.  "啊原来是你亲表妹"  How confusing.  And so when i'm showing family photos, I have to explain 'blood brother' and 'blood sister', (亲弟弟，亲姐姐).

 

Anyhow this thing is pretty cool.  I'd like to print out the family tree and try to understand it all one day :)

http://www.mandarintools.com/family.html