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Disclaimer: I am not a tax consultant and this is completely my own take on the matter.Filing for tax in OPT can be tricky because of the sheer number of rules and conditions that apply when you are an 'alien' and also 'student'. I will try to cover the basics.The first thing that you want to check is your tax residency. Now tax residency is completely differet from your immigration status in US as considered by USCIS and other federal institutions. Here is the link for webpage from IRS that has all the rules to determine your tax residency.Determining Alien Tax StatusThe Substantial Presence Test part has been explained very well by Xuan, so do read it.Now if you are on OPT then generally you would fall under these three categories:1. You are on OPT as of 31st December or last date of your stay in USA. In this case you will be a non-resident alien for tax purpose. The form you should be looking for 1040NR or 1040 NR EZ, the first one is for itemized deductions and the 2nd one for standard deduction. Now if you happen to be from India, you are still able to claim standard deduction (for single person born after 1st January 1950, it is $6200) because India has a Tax Treaty with USA (US India Income Tax Treaty - Article 21) that allows students to claim standard deduction. This needs to be mentioned in Point 11 of 1040 NR-EZ form. As mentioned by Xuan here, the easiest way to file is to use Glacier Tax Preparation software. Here is the link for Glacier. Glacier automatically does Form 8843 for you. Many schools offer this software for free to their students, so do check out your international office or registrar's office.GLACIER Tax Prep - Home2. You are on OPT but you have been student for more than five years in USA.You have established tax residency so you can use form 1040 (itemized) or 1040 EZ (standard) to file your tax return. You can also use popular software such as TurboTax and H&R Block. There are many discounts available for TurboTax and H&R blocks such as Discover Card and State Farm members; so do explore.3. You were on OPT till 30th September and you are on H1b from 1st October.This one is crazy, so hang tight. Glacier will consider you as a non-resident alien and do a 1040 NR-EZ. I went through the form 519 of IRS (Page on irs.gov ) and as I understood, you also need to complete form 8843 along with 1040 NR-EZ. However you can not claim the tax treaty benefit anymore because you were on H1b visa on the last day of your stay in USA. You can still claim an amount of $3950 as an individual exemption. (Point 13 of 1040 NR-EZ). You are probably better off with doing an itemized deduction in this scenario which may be well above $3950, with form 1040NR. Even though your question is how to do it by yourself, I would advice you to seek a reputed tax consultant if you fall in the third category and go with Itemized Deductions with form 1040NR. If you want to do it yourself, the schedule of items that can be deducted is different from what a Resident Alien can, so read the instructions:http://www.Internal Revenue Service/pub/irs-pdf/i1040nr.pdfWhen you are talking to your consultant make sure that he/she understands filing for non-residents well. If someone is claiming he/she can get you way above what others are telling, I would stay away from them.You may have to file FBAR also. Read the instructions here: Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR).Finally, I would say chances that your IT return will be audited by IRS is fairly low, but an my advice is avoid incorrect filing. The larger the sum of your return, the higher is your risk of being audited. Best of luck! :)Edit: I put this together long back, and tax rules have changed. Please refer to the current tax laws for filing your return. Thanks!

The short answer is that the Duchess of Sussex does not break so-called ‘royal protocol’.Rather, there is a mistaken belief, circulated by less-established publications and websites, which has completely misunderstood the meaning of the term ‘protocol’ and has circulated some fictional ‘rules’, encouraging their readerships to believe that Meghan and others are persistently breaching rules.To understand this properly requires a bit of knowledge about the meaning of the term ‘royal protocol’.What does ‘protocol’ mean?Origin of the term ‘protocol’: The word ‘protocol’ has multiple origins, but its English use is mostly from a 1300s French term protocolle meaning a register of transactions and later a collection of formulas for drawing up public acts. In English, the term comes into use in international law in the 1700s as a record of diplomatic negotiations and agreements, and in the 1800s to refer to the record of a scientific experiment (by the mid-1900s, it was used in science to refer to the method, procedure and instructions for carrying out an experiment or a medical procedure and we still use it this way regularly, including in the health and social sciences).In reference to ‘etiquette’ in international diplomacy: The term comes to be used in the mid-to-late 1800s (Victorian era) in English to refer to an official etiquette “to be observed by the head of state and other dignitaries in ceremonies and relations with the representatives of other states; the procedure governing diplomatic occasions, affairs of state, etc” (OED). The name was used to describe a much older set of practices: ceremonial politeness to ensure the dignity of all parties in an international diplomatic event so as not cause offence and thereby disrupt negotiations, cause breakdown of agreements or result in war, etc.Government departments and were often set up to help manage international ceremonial events, such as meetings of heads of states, for example, by the late-1800s the British foreign office had an office of the Director of Protocol which advised all parties on appropriate greetings, gift-giving, extent of ceremony, etc., and dealing with anomalies, changes, requests, etc. Government officials charged with managing protocol still exist (e.g., managing an official state visit by Donald Trump to the UK, arranging who will greet whom at the airport, at events, etc., negotiating with Buckingham Palace on arranging a state dinner, discussing guest lists, etc., and working with the White House to agree all round. The aim of these departments is to save the heads of state and senior government officials from having to know every detail themselves. Protocol changes over time, and such departments record these.In reference to other kinds of ‘etiquette’: The term protocol was extended from this usage in the early 1900s to refer to other kinds of ceremonial etiquette, “accepted or established code of behaviour in any group, organization, or situation” (OED). For example, the etiquette in a university during the conferring of degrees, whereby it is recognised that professors will wear their full gowns and caps; taking a senior guest for a business meeting out to lunch; sending someone of certain seniority to greet a noted guest at a theatre event; standing up in court when a judge arrives in the room, etc.Sometimes it includes appropriate dress: for example, the expectation that men will wear formal dress (white tie) at certain kinds of important events, semi-formal (black tie; tuxedo) at others, informal attire (business suit) etc. That is, protocol might mean not wearing casual dress at a wedding unless otherwise instructed to do so. In this sense, protocol is about making sure one does cause offence and that not following protocol would result in social embarrassment (which is why if one is uncertain about dress, the appropriateness of shaking hands, whether one should invite an honoured guest to a private drinks, whether to kiss a bishop on the ring, etc. we usually ask in advance).Are protocols rules?Protocol or etiquette are not sets of “rules”.Rather, they are customs and recognised behaviour, usually built on traditions but open to change. They are socially-understood codes of good manners or polite behaviour in public settings. Nothing more.In many cases, they are not codified or written down; rather they are known and assumed, or they might form parts of guidelines or etiquette books.Whether in international diplomatic ceremonies or arranging a public event with an honoured speaker, there are no direct penalties for getting it wrong or even for deliberately breaking protocol to be troublesome.Some people might be bound by protocol by their jobs: for example, a military officer failing to undertake the right kind of salute for a person of a certain dignity. A professor might be in trouble with his or her university for wearing a t-shirt to a graduation ceremony and thereby bringing the university into disrepute, etc.What is royal protocol? Official eventsIn the British and Commonwealth context, royal protocol refers to exactly the same as above in relation to the sovereign and senior members of the royal family. Most properly, it refers to the customs and expectations in relation to official functions, e.g., ambassadors meeting the Queen for the first time; order of precedence when being announced at a formal event such as a state dinner.It is merely customs and expectations of polite behaviour, but has come to form a part of the practice of putting on a State Dinner that is designed to please or impress the foreign guests: being introduced in a particular way, being greeted by senior members of the royal family, bearing witness to various other guests being introduced to the room in a particular order, etc. Again, it is about making sure there is no offense, and making sure there is no embarrassment. Protocol officers help make sure the ‘theatre’ of formal events is pre-arranged to look natural. Today, a gaffe or a slip-up doesn’t matter at all, but no one wishes any party to embarrassed.What is royal protocol? Publics meeting the Sovereign, etc.Occasionally, people refer to royal protocol in relation to members of the public greeting the Queen or members of the royal family. This is only correct depending on certain circumstances: for example, if receiving a medal, award or honour from Princess Anne, it will be protocol to approach the podium when called, to bow/curtsey, to address them as Your Royal Highness (etc.), to wait for the medal to be pinned, to shake hands afterwards, etc.There may be some guidance given on the day by a courtier or official. These are broadly recommendations for polite behaviour. Again, the aim is to make sure no one is offended.In other circumstances, it is even less important. For example, if the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall are at the barricades, greeting members of the public who have come out to see them, it is not compulsory or a rule to bow or curtsey to them. Nor is it even much of an expectation today. Rather, it is simply considered polite behaviour and, in the twenty-first century, it is not considered at all impolite to choose not to do so.Royal protocol for members of the royal familyThis use of the term royal protocol appears a lot in some of the trashier media and it is almost completely incorrect, suggesting there are a list of rules specific to members of the royal family.There is no such thing as ‘royal protocol’ describing a list of rules for members of the royal family.There are certain kinds of rules and practices for ‘working royals’ (those who are on the sovereign’s payroll to represent her at official, formal and community events, i.e., Prince Charles and Camilla, Prince William and Catherine, Prince Harry and Meghan, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward and Sophie, the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent).These customs are not published. Basically, they comprise of a set of preferences by the Queen in relation to how members of the royal family behave, dress and speak in relation to formal events. Most of what is known about these rules is guesswork, although it is understood there are certain standards of dress that the Queen prefers working royals adopt for formal and semi-formal occasions when representing her, and certain practices over sharing of personal views officially that may be mistaken to represent her rather than be personal.They have nothing at all to do with what members of the royal family get up to in their own time, what they wear when attending an event for a charity or organisation for which they are personally a patron, how they greet their friends, or whether they allow a member of the public to hug them.Misappropriation of the term by trashy magazines and tabloidsOver recent years, a number of magazines and tabloid newspapers have begun using the term to describe what they believe to be a set of rules for members of the royal family to follow.Most of this media use lately seems to be lists of so-called failures by the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan) to dress as conservatively as the 93 year-old Queen or in the manner of the Duchess of Cambridge (Catherine).Much of this is designed to generate a base emotional response in the publication’s readership: shock or anger that Meghan or some other member of the royal family has ‘failed’ to keep up a particular standard, no matter how ridiculous that standard might be.For example, in August 2019, Cosmopolitan published online an article describing “51 Times Meghan Markle has Broken Royal Protocol”. Most of it is based on a very ill-informed understanding of protocol, etiquette or expectations. They included some of the following:Harry and Meghan holding hands in public (with the claim that it is a breach of royal protocol to display affection in public. It may, for example, be the Queen’s preference that they minimise affectionate attention to each other when dealing with guests so as not to appear self-absorbed, but beyond that is not a ‘rule).Meghan photographed wearing pants (actually worn while Harry was in either a business suit, i.e., informal attire, or in casual attire. There is no rule preventing Meghan from matching Harry’s standard of dress, indeed it would be expected. This was not a state dinner).Sharing her political views prior to her marriage (again, there is no rule that throws her out for having declared herself a feminist, and there is no constitutional breach for members of the sovereign’s family to hold and share political views—that protocol applies only to the Queen).Having her hair in a loose bun (seriously).Carrying a tote rather than a clutch purse (again, wtf)Taking off her shoes at the beach (the claim being that it breached protocol on the basis that there is a photograph of Diana keeping her shoes on at the beach!)Having a diamond engagement ring rather than another kind of gemstone (on basis Diana/Catherine’s ring was a sapphire).Failure to share publicly details about her birth plan (ridiculous; there is no compulsion by the Queen on any member of the royal family to make such private details public).Similarly, in June 2019 Harper’s Bazaar published what it called “The 30 Most Shocking Rules Royals Are Required to Follow.” Again, notice the use of emotive language to introduce shock, in this case, about the strictness or silliness of the so-called rules. In this case, even more that have absolutely nothing to do with royal protocolThat it is a breach of royal protocol to refer to a sofa as a couch, a drawing room as a living room or lounge, to refer to a scent as a perfume (these are simply distinctions based on class differences in the use of language from the early twentieth century)That it is a breach of protocol to hold a teacup in any way other than with two fingers, etc. (their lives are not a period film based on a Jane Austen novel).A rule that there must be no serving or eating garlic (there is a known preference that the Queen prefers a certain diet, but that does not prevent her family from eating as they please).Royal boys must wear shorts until they are twelve (not a rule)Royals must always use formal titles and never nicknames (completely incorrect, there is a long history of nicknames among royals, peers and other aristocrats)Bridal parties at royal weddings must include children (apparently)Again, most of these have nothing to do with royal protocol. While some aspects of what the trash media refer to as royal protocols are preferences of the Queen that a ‘working royal’ follows when representing her and may adopt when spending time with her in informal settings (e.g., the way one respects grandma’s wishes that men keep their shirts on while at her house), but none of the Harper’s Bazaar examples of royal protocol are actually protocol at all.Rather, this is a piece of non-evidenced, poorly-written nonsense, designed to attract reader interest regardless of the way in which it creates false beliefs.In short, we need to be very careful when attempting to assess whether Meghan or a member of the public has broken some rule by first understanding the difference between formal ceremonies and informal events; expectations on ‘working royals’ representing the Queen at an event rather than representing themselves; and finally on realising that there is no published set of rules for royal family members or members of the public interacting with them, and that most of those attempts by magazines and tabloid papers to claim ‘breaches of royal protocol’ are completely false.

This is known: the children spoke Russian with their father, the Tsar, and English with their mother, the Tsarina. However, the surviving records of original writing left behind by the children indicate that their Russian was stronger than their English, which was never perfect.To this day, people still argue over whether the native language of the Tsarina was German or English (she was born a German princess in Germany to a half-English mother, but was partly raised by her Anglo-German grandmother, Queen Victoria, in England after the untimely death of her mother). In any event, the Tsar and the Tsarina spoke English with one another, as evidenced by the surviving samples of correspondence between each other. I suppose, therefore, that, when the immediate family of the Tsar was all together en famille, they spoke more English than Russian, but, if the Tsarina was not there, then Russian was the norm. The Tsarina, who literally had about six weeks’ tuition in Russian before she was thrust into the position of Tsarina because of the death of her father-in-law, Tsar Alexander III, never fully mastered the Russian language during her twenty-three years as wife of the Tsar. This was held against her by her Russian-speaking subjects who, as the Revolution approached, referred to her contemptuously as Нѣмка (Němka), meaning The German Woman.In addition to Russian, the children had tutors for English (Sidney Gibbes, an Englishman) and French (Pierre Gilliard, a Swiss national). It is sometimes claimed that, amongst the children, only the Tsesarevitch, Alexei, ever really mastered French, perhaps due to his closeness to their tutor. It is also known that the Tsarina felt awkward speaking French, which was yet another of the criticisms levelled at her by the Imperial Russian court, where fluency in French was an absolute requirement.The exact role of German in the family’s domestic life remains unclear. Whilst definitely behind Russian, English and French in prominence, it was not entirely absent from their life either. The records indicate that at least the elder sisters, the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana, received lessons in German before the Revolution and, indeed, continued to receive instruction in that language after the Revolution (including by the Tsarina herself: both parents acted as ad-hoc tutors to their children, faute de mieux, after the Revolution). It is also known that the family’s physician, Dr. Evgeny (Eugene) Sergeyevitch Botkin, who accompanied the Imperial Family into exile and was murdered alongside them, spoke in German with the Tsarina. Before the Revolution, Dr. Botkin sometimes acted as an informal interpreter for the Tsarina in the presence of Russian-speakers with whom she did not otherwise have a language in common. The records also indicate that the Tsarina was reprimanded by the guards in the family’s place of incarceration in Yekaterinburg in 1918 for speaking in German with Dr. Botkin and with her daughters (the rules of incarceration required the family to speak in Russian only, at least in the presence of the guards). However, and given that many (although not all) of the guards were not educated in foreign languages, it is believed that at least some of the guards mistook the Tsarina’s English for German (a hundred years ago, and in a reversal of the situation that prevails today, German was much better known in Russia than English). Those of the guards who did have a knowledge of foreign languages (specifically, English, French and German) used it clandestinely in order to eavesdrop and report on the family during their period of captivity.From my reading about the Imperial Family and what I have able to ascertain, here is my assessment of the languages that each member of the family spoke, in approximate order of descending fluency:(NB / Please do not take this as gospel: it is by necessity a personal opinion and an approximate assessment, based on my own reading of historical accounts of everyday life within the family, the correspondence written by them and the frequency of use of the various languages in which they wrote their correspondence, as well as the fluency and ‘naturalness’ of the same. All of the subjects themselves are now long-deceased, as is anyone who knew them intimately, hence there is no way now to assess this on purely scientific, objective criteria.)H.I.M. Tsar Nicholas II: Russian (native), French, English, German, DanishH.I.M. Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna: English (joint native), German (joint native), French, RussianH.I.H. Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna: Russian (native), English, French, GermanH.I.H. Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna: Russian (native), English, French, GermanH.I.H. Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna: Russian (native), English, FrenchH.I.H. Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna: Russian (native), English, FrenchH.I.H. Tsesarevitch Alexei Nikolaevitch: Russian (native), English, FrenchThe presence of Danish on this list (in the case of the Tsar himself), might seem unexpected, but in this case it has to be remembered that his mother, H.I.M. the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, was born Princess Dagmar of Denmark. When the Tsar was growing up, the annual visit to his maternal grandparents’ home in Denmark was one of the things that he, his parents and siblings looked forward to, because Denmark was one of the very few places where the Russian Imperial Family - which was constantly under threat of assassination, particularly from the last quarter of the 19th century onwards - could meet its relatives in a relaxed setting with a reduced security retinue.EDIT: I was recently reminded, when reading (yet) another article on the internet about the Russian Imperial Family, that a member of the family’s suite - namely, Ekaterina Adol’fovna Schneider, a Russian lady of Baltic German origin who had incidentally been the tutor in Russian to the Tsarina upon her first arrival in Russia (as referred-to above) - was supposed to assist with tutoring the children in German.However, Mlle. Schneider’s position at court was officially one of lectrice (literally, ‘reader’, being the person responsible for the reading material of another person, in this case the Tsarina), rather than as a tutor to the children. I don’t believe that Mlle. Schneider was ever officially appointed as a tutor to the children, although her closeness to the Tsarina would have meant that she would have been a constant presence in their lives. I say that Mlle. Schneider - known to the family as ‘Trina’ for short - was ‘supposed to’ assist with tutoring the children in German, because the surviving accounts indicate that she was not overly successful in conveying the language to them. The children, in spite of the Anglo-German origins of their own mother and the fact that German royalty formed by far the largest group of royalty in Europe at the time (hence there was a high chance that one of the children would marry a spouse from Germany or from one of the other royal families of Europe of recent German origin, such as that of Greece, Romania or Bulgaria), just do not seem to have had much interest in the language. Therefore, and whilst they were certainly not ignorant of the German language, it just does not seem to have played a major role in their lives in the way that Russian, English and French did.This fact is perhaps connected with their parents’ distaste of their own cousin and overall ruler of Germany at the time, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Their maternal grandmother, the Dowager Empress, also had ‘issues’ with Germany on account of her being a Danish princess by birth (Denmark had lost a significant amount of territory to the German state of Prussia in the 1860’s, and this dominated the relationship between Denmark and Germany until after the Great War of 1914–18). So, perhaps there is something in the respective attitudes of their parents and grandmother towards the German government of the era that led to a lesser position of German within the family than circumstances might have otherwise dictated.As a final point, it is a sad coda to the story of the tutors to the Imperial Family that, whereas Gibbes (English) and Gilliard (French) survived the Revolution and lived on for many years thereafter outside of Russia, Mlle. Schneider (German) did not. Alongside some other former members of the family’s retinue, Mlle. Schneider was marched by the Bolsheviks into the forest outside of Perm in western Siberia in September 1918 and shot.