An Excursion into Ukrainian
Learning two languages at once can be challenging
“Hello, how are you?” “My name is Alison.” “What is your name?”
And so starts every language course, just like when I learned the first few words of French at primary school, many years ago.
I am taking an introductory course in Ukrainian, designed for people who already know some Russian. In our first lesson, our teacher spoke Russian to explain the principles and translate vocabulary. I thought that would be difficult, like having to cope with two new languages at once. Instead, it made me realise how far I have come with my Russian and that Ukrainian is going to be a whole new challenge. From the second lesson, though, Russian was banished. We spoke almost entirely in Ukrainian, practising and using our simple knowledge. We will only have five lessons, just enough to give us an overview, so we are progressing fast.
I can’t get over how different Ukrainian sounds from Russian. Of course, every language has its own distinctive melody and rhythm, that blur of sounds you hear background conversation, but you can’t quite pick out the words. Somehow, because there are so many similar words, I would expect the two languages to sound similar. But Ukrainian has something of a sing-song metre, more of a central European feel, perhaps more like…
