Is Ukrainian Hard to Learn for English Speakers?

Ukrainian is a fascinating language with growing importance in the world on multiple fronts. There are many great reasons to become fluent in the language. This article aims to provide helpful information on the challenges and strategies involved in learning Ukrainian for English speakers. While Ukrainian is not an easy language to learn, it is achievable with a well-defined plan, consistency, and dedication.

The Allure and Importance of Ukrainian

Ukrainian is an Eastern Slavic language related to Russian, Belorussian, and Polish. It holds a significant place in the world in terms of art, history, economy, and international politics. While Russian is also widely understood in Ukraine, speaking Ukrainian is often better received, especially when focusing specifically on engaging with Ukrainian culture and society. Learning Ukrainian allows one to get closer to Ukrainian culture and to speak to the Ukrainian people’s hearts rather than their minds.

The Myth of "Easy" Languages

The notion that "no languages are difficult to learn" should be taken with a grain of salt. While children acquire languages naturally, replicating this process as an adult is slow and practically ineffective. Learning a language like a child would entail complete language immersion for a decade or two. Taking charge of your learning takes dedication and consistency. You need to put in the work and do it every day. That goes for Ukrainian as well as any other language.

Challenges in Learning Ukrainian

Ukrainian presents several challenges for English speakers:

Grammatical Cases: Ukrainian has seven grammatical cases, similar to Polish, which define the role of a noun in a sentence. German, often considered difficult, has four. As an example, in English, we have the genetive case, which deals with property. It works by adding “‘s” to the noun (or name) which is the proprietor of the object described in the sentence.
Pronunciation: Ukrainian pronunciation can be complicated for English speakers.
Vocabulary: Ukrainian vocabulary is very different from English.
Cyrillic Alphabet: Ukrainian is written with the Cyrillic alphabet, which, while not a major obstacle, requires initial familiarization. It’s similar to Russian, but with a few letters being a little different.

Getting Started: The Ukrainian Alphabet

In order to get going with your Ukrainian studies, you need to start familiarizing yourself with the alphabet. Ukrainian is pretty consistent in its spelling. As soon as you know how each individual letter is pronounced, you can read out loud in Ukrainian. To learn the Ukrainian alphabet, it is recommended to do a little handwriting exercise. Write each letter carefully, pronouncing it out loud. Doing this a couple of times per day for 2-3 days should suffice to learn the alphabet. It’s not that hard!

Beginner Resources and Courses

As a complete beginner in Ukrainian, you might want to start with an audio course like Pimsleur. Pimsleur is a very slow-paced course that focuses on correct pronunciation and simple, intuitive grammar. If you’re completely new to learning languages by yourself, it can be helpful to start by doing this course. It has the advantage of taking you by the hand and introducing you to the bases of the language. The fact that it is slow-paced is an advantage for the complete beginner. It is advisable to move beyond Pimsleur once the basics are grasped.

Talk In Ukrainian and Teach Yourself Ukrainian

Your first starting point should absolutely be Talk In Ukrainian. If you prefer a book, then one recommended resource is Teach Yourself Ukrainian. Teach Yourself is a course built up with dialogues, exercises, and grammar explanations. It is suggested to do one lesson per day. First, read the English translation to get an idea what the dialogue is about. Then listen to the audio, while you follow along the Ukrainian text. Lastly, go through the Ukrainian phrases one by one, pausing the recording to repeat out loud. Try to make sense of the Ukrainian writing. How does the letters correspond to the pronunciation? Then read the grammar explanations and try to take note of the things that are explained. But don’t stress this part.

The Power of Parallel Learning

It is effective to do multiple courses or approaches at the same time when studying foreign languages. Even through you do your revisions, you study a lot and you are diligent - there’s just nothing like seeing stuff you’ve already touched upon in another context. The moment you recognize a word or a grammar point, it’ll make you remember it better because you’ll be creating a positive association to that word. Learning words from a book is neutral to the brain. It’s information, but it doesn’t stand out. Seeing it somewhere else is a little victory.

Colloquial Ukrainian

If Assimil L’Ukrainien is not an option, try having a look at Colloquial Ukrainian. Colloquial is a course in the same style as Teach Yourself. It’s got dialogues, audio, grammar explanations and drills and you can use it in pretty much the same way.

Intermediate Stage: Glossika

Glossika is a language learning program that has a huge archive of Ukrainian sentences that you can study. The system is laid out in such a way that you’re gradually introduced to vocabulary and grammar through context. You’re learning the grammar through recognizing patterns rather than explanations. With Glossika, instead of analytically dissecting sentences and intellectually studying their grammar, you learn it by habit. When you first start studying with Glossika, you will be faced with an English sentence and the equivalent in Ukrainian. The English sentence will be played out loud followed by a pause, then the Ukrainian translation is played two times followed by a pause. When you first hear the English sentence, try reading the Ukrainian sentence out loud during the short pause. Do this rather quickly, because you don’t have a lot of time. Try mimicking the speaker exactly is it’s spoken. Do it out loud, with the same intonation, speed and rhythm! Each new Glossika lesson is a batch of five new sentences repeated five times, so 25 times in total. These are quickly done.

Read also: Beginner's Guide to Ukrainian

Reps and the Forgetting Curve

Glossika will schedule the sentences you study to be reviewed. After around 12-24 hours, you should see the sentences you studied earlier up for review already! Each time you do your reviews, Glossika will schedule the sentence a little further into the future. This is done with a mathematical algorithm based on something called the forgetting curve. The algorithm tries to predict for how long you’ll remember a word you just studied. Then it’ll schedule the sentence for review just before that. Doing these revisions or “reps” is one of the key aspects of how Glossika works. Reps are actually used as a way to measure your progress in Ukrainian.

Reading in Ukrainian

Reading is one of the most important activities when learning a new language, and Ukrainian is no exception.

Avoiding Dictionary Dependency

Constantly looking up things in a dictionary is extremely frustrating. You never get the chance to get into the plot and you’ll forget what the story was about in no time. And two minutes after looking up a word, you’ll forget it anyways. Reading with a dictionary can be done as an exercise in intensive reading, where you do it for one page per session for example.

Leveraging Technology: Google Dictionary

Using a pop-up dictionary like Google Dictionary is a great way to make online texts in Ukrainian easier to understand. With Google Dictionary, you simply click any word, anywhere on the internet in order to get an instant translation of that word in English. This is immensely helpful when trying to read interesting content in Ukrainian. To find articles in Ukrainian, try simply writing what you’re interested in into Google Translate, and search for your keyword in Ukrainian.

Choosing the Right Material

Generally if a subject or theme is difficult to grasp when you read it in English, not because of vocabulary, but because of the subject matter being difficult; Don’t bother reading it in Ukrainian.

Read also: Your Path to Ukrainian Fluency

LingQ: A Comprehensive Reading Tool

LingQ offers a lot of different things, but in my opinion, one of its strongest assets is the app and the built in reader. When you first start studying with LingQ, you’ll be faced with a whole page of words marked in blue. As you click on the words, a popup with popular translations will show up. You can either pick one, or you can click “I know this word” if you already know it. If you pick a translation, the word color will change to yellow. Yellow words are words you don’t know yet, but aren’t unknown either. They’re the words you’re in the process of learning. As soon as you’ve finished the text, I recommend that you go have a look at your collection of yellow words (or “LingQ’s” as they’re called). For each one, go look at the translation again. Here, I recommend that you change the translation to some kind of “hint”. It could be a synonym in Ukrainian or an explanation in your own words. If you do this for each word you’re learning, you’ll create a memory about that word. When you see it again, you’ll be faced with your own formulation or the synonym that you’ve found yourself rather than an automatic translation. This is actually really important!

Parallel Text Reading

First read a sentence, a paragraph or a chapter in English, then read the same thing in Ukrainian. This won’t automatically make you know all words in the Ukrainian book you’re learning, but it’ll help you actually read in Ukrainian completely fluently.

Exploring Ukrainian Literature

Ukraine has a great literary tradition and there are many great books worth reading. Have a look at Voroshilovgrad, a crazy road novel by Serhiy Zhadan that plays with different genres and makes for an exciting read. Or The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, a multi-generational drama by one of Ukraine’s great modern feminist writers Oksana Zabuzhko.

Conversation and Tutoring

It is recommended that you start by looking for an Ukrainian language tutor. There are many places online where tutors offer their services for a fee. One is Italki. It is suggested that you take charge of your tutoring sessions and focus on conversation. You should agree on a subject beforehand, then schedule a conversation of 30-45 minutes. Spend this time speaking in Ukrainian only! And ask your tutor to keep corrections to an absolute minimum. After the end of a conversation, sit down and write a short text on the subject you just discussed. In the beginning, aim for 100-300 words. Send the text to your tutor and have it corrected.

Language Exchange Partners

A language buddy is someone who speaks your target language, and who’s learning a language that you know well. You then act as a tutor for one another. This can ideally work really well, and you can use the same approach as the one I described above with a paid tutor. It can however be difficult to find a language partner who has the same ambition, dedication and approach as you do. And even if you find a great language buddy, you’ll need to spend a lot of time being a tutor yourself. Whether you choose to find a language partner or a tutor, with a dedicated approach and consistency, you’re sure to reach a high level of Ukrainian. At this point only the sky is the limit.

Factors Influencing Learning Time

The time it takes to learn Ukrainian varies depending on several factors:

Prior Language Learning Experience: Experience with other languages, especially Slavic languages, significantly accelerates the learning process.
Motivation: A strong motivation and genuine love for the language enhance learning receptiveness.
Time Investment: Consistent daily study, even in short sessions, is more effective than infrequent long sessions.
Study Habits: Effective study habits, including focused sessions and spaced repetition, optimize learning.

The US Foreign Service Institute classes it as a category 3 language which takes students 1100 hours to learn on average (in optimal situations). When speaking of language proficiency, the CEFR-levels are often used as a way of speaking of the different levels. Both intermediary levels (B1 and B2) will allow you to converse and communicate with Ukrainians and get by in Ukraine without relying on another language. It makes a huge difference.

Overcoming the Initial Hurdle

The last point is actually an essential one because it appears that there is an invisible obstacle that all people learning their first foreign language needs to overcome. They need to accept that English is not the only way to communicate. In order to get used to Ukrainian cases, you’ll need to be able to step aside from English for a while and forget what you already know. If Ukrainian is your first foreign language, though, it’ll take longer.

Optimal Study Strategies

I’ve found that I get most out of studying something like 45 minutes to 1½ hours a day. If I do more, I get less effective. If you study every day, you’ll stay in a continuous flow of learning Ukrainian and each study session will carry on from where the last one ended in a much better way. Spreading small study sessions throughout your day will keep your mind constantly tuned-in to Ukrainian.

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