Hey! This is Conor the Language Tsar so
today I'm speaking to you from Thessaloniki
in Greece and I've come here for the
Polyglot Conference 2016 that's just
about a kickoff so I just thought I'd
shoot this quick video before I head down
to the opening event of the
conference so as I promised now that
my learn Ukrainian language mission is
complete, I was there in Lviv and I
shot ... I gave you about 10 videos the 10
days that I was there studying Ukrainian.
Now I'm going to give you a series of
review videos where I review the main
language tools that I used, the main
products and the language school that I
attended when I was in Lviv and how
I got on with each product and each way
of learning the language so in this
video I'm going to review the Ukrainian
Language and Culture School in Lviv
so I was actually really skeptical when I
first considered going to a language
school because in the past my experience
with learning languages at school had been
awful. Basically in high school ... I mean if ...
I don't know we should try probably do
a calculation of hours I spent in
language classes. For me it was in Irish and
French and my level was basically almost
non-existent once I had left school
we'll say a year later right because when
I prepared for the exams obviously I had a
certain level that allowed me to get through
them. So in spite of this scepticism I
said I'd go with an open mind.
Now the first thing that I thought
worked really well at the school was the
fact that the classes were really small,
like two people small. So I think this
made a big difference to my experience
because if you're in a class of like 5, 6
10 like in high schools 20 maybe
people, you have only a tiny tiny tiny
part of time in which you interact personally
with the teacher and that means that you
don't actually get the tuition tailored
in anyway that's engaging to you if
you're only going to speak for like two
minutes out an hour and the rest of the time
you're going to be passive. It's very hard to stay
interested but that's very different if
there's only two students in the class
because basically you're interacting
non-stop. So I was there for three
hours a day and there was one other
student and that student was quite
interesting because they had
previously studied Polish. Now I was
telling you ... we're both studying Ukrainian
and I already speak Russian to an
intermediate level and that's a
cognitive language and so is Polish
Polish is also a cognate
language with Ukrainian. That means
they can have the same family of
languages. That's the Slovak family of
Indo-European languages. Now they come
from the same family but their
similarities with Ukrainian are actually quite different.
Russian has very similar grammar.
[The] grammatical structure is pretty easy to
follow in Ukrainian. I found that very easy but
the vocabulary is very different.
It has a lexical similarity of
around you know forty fifty percent
somewhere in that ballpark figure whilst
Polish on the other hand is not
similar, as similar at least
grammatically to Ukrainian as Russian is
but the vocabulary is a lot more
similar so their lexical similarity is
somewhere between and think it seventy to
eighty percent around that ballpark figure
depending on the methodology. So that makes it a
lot easier to understand the words if
you speak Polish but hard to understand
the grammar compared to ... while it's the
opposite for me in fact so I found that
interaction with the student really interesting
and we were always constantly
engaged because the conversation was
basically between me and the other student
and the teacher continuously for the
entire time I was there and I thought the
teacher picked out both grammatical and
vocabulary poinst that we were going to learn
in each class quite strategically based
on these previous experiences that we
had. So it was quite well tailored and she
focused on getting us to speak which is the
most important in the beginning because
then after the class I went outside
and of course spoke in Ukrainian in the
shops and restaurants with people I met.
It didn't always work out. They always
understand. Sometimes then I'd switch to
Russian to improve the easy
communication and I also uses code
switching. I have another video
on that. It was day 9 of the language
mission videos so you should go check that one out if you're
interested how I use Russian words when
I didn't know the Ukrainian ones and how
that helped me to learn Ukrainian words
faster. So overall actually I was quite
surprised in spite of my skepticism, my
two-week program at the Ukrainian
Language and Culture School in
Lviv was actually a success, I would
say overall. So I'm giving a
thumbs-up on that particular part of my
language learning mission. I certainly
learned a lot. It got me very
enthusiastic about the language. I was
immediately using it for three hours of the
day in spite of having not learned the
language previously and so that was
really really great. So if you've
been recently to language school or
you'd have ... would like to share your
experiences on having learnt
languages in a school whether it was a
high-school or a specific language school
later on,
write me in the comments section below
the video and this is going to be a
series of videos so videos coming up are
going to be about iTalki, Glossika,
LanguageBoost and LingQ. They were the
other programs that I used during the
Learn Ukrainian mission and there
are links to all of those below in the
description of this video along with a
link to the school if you're interested
in learning more about languages and
traveling and being a digital nomada and
you want to be in contact with
like-minded people maybe hit me up for
some particular burning questions that
you have then you should sign up for my
mailing list. Now there's a link to that
below that's completely free and there
is also some bonus videos there and you
can unsubscribe if you don't like it
afterwards. That's not a problem. I give
an option in all the emails. So
you should go and do that straightaway
because I'm going to be opening up an inner
circle in the next ... just after this
conference is over and you need to be on
the mailing list in order to apply for that. I
have that reserved for
exclusively for those who are already on
my mailing list so go do that right now.
There's a link below. So it's a bye-bye from
Conor, the Language Tsar from Thessaloniki
in Greece until the next video!