It's Steve Kauffman of LingQ so I've been a big fan of Steve's because
when I first started watching these videos with the leading polyglots Steve
has one of my favorite channels he has an amazing
resource of videos for language learners.
So what should I watch out for? I mean because you also were in a
similar situation. You had learned Russian before your Ukrainian which is my case and I
have pretty much the same motivation because I'm going to be learning it
because I'm interested in the culture and the politics of the country. I'm also
going to be there. So what tips do you have in terms of watching
out for things in Ukrainian. What could help?
First of all I should say that I'm totally
envious. If I had been in Lviv or even in Odessa learning Ukrainian I
would have been like that's heaven right.
We can still make that happen. You can come and visit.
All right well I've got to come. Don't forget
too I did Russian then I did Czech and then I went to Ukrainian.
You know, a lot of people... like there are going to be moments where you confuse,
right? And there will even be moments like now when I go to speak Russian when
I can't find the Russian word and the Polish word or the Ukrainian word pops
up and I just can't find my way back to the Russian word. Those are the
disadvantages of learning similar languages.
That's totally outweighed by the advantages.
It's also something that have previously encountered with Italian French Spanish
Portuguese Romanian even because they're also from the same language group which is
the Romance language group but this will just be my second Slavic language so
it's not going to be that difficult at the beginning.
Yeah, but it's such a minor thing
overwhelmingly you're going to find that you can
get into relatively difficult content pretty quickly as long as you have
access to an online dictionary. Because reading a book just a book it
would be too much work to look everything up in the dictionary and I
find that if I look something up in a dictionary I close the dictionary and forget what
was there. So, I would recommend you do it on LingQ, of course, but you'll find
other resources.
I'm looking forward to trying that with Ukrainian.
We have a fair amount of content there in
Ukrainian, most of which was loaded up there for my purposes but a lot of
listening and reading. Some of the things, you know,
you going to have to to get used to saying "але" instead of "но"
Some of those things will happen fairly early. Don't get too fussed about
confusion especially in Ukraine where they even the locals do that all the time.
With Surzhyk it's kind of a mixture between the two
languages. Similar to Portuñol between Spanish and Portuguese
and that's spoken kind of in this border linguistic borderline more or less.
It's not even a consistent mix it just depends. People will
maybe speak Russian with some Ukrainian words or Ukrainian with some Russian words.
So everybody's gonna understand me that's the point.
Yeah I think, you know, in my situation
...I bought a Teach Yourself book, a starter book, but I can't say that
took a lot away from it because they tell you okay the endings are this way
and they have a slightly different future form in Ukrainian that they don't
have in Russian and there are few things like that. It's content, it's just content.
To me, language learning is about ingesting a lot of
audio, like meaningful content - Stephan Krashen. You've got to get
a lot of that into you and it's easier to start with easier content. But I
would say that within a few weeks you want to get into authentic content which
is easier to do again on LingQ because you can look up every word, you can review
the words, you listen and you read and and pretty soon you're motivated by the
content matter so in my case pretty soon I started to get a gist of what the
Ukrainians were saying on Shuster Live and there are in terms of the resources
like Hromadske Radio. One of the problems I guess in the
post-Soviet world is that you've got to find content that at least appears to be
somewhat objective.
Yeah. There's a lot lot of partisan political discourse in the former Soviet
Union and that's in all the countries not in particular Russia, say, or Kazakhstan.
So I found Hromadske Radio to be very good. They have a podcast which you can
download. The disadvantage is that there's no transcript. So if you need to you can
get that transcribed which is what I did for Romanian for example. I went to Radio România
and I got a bunch of stuff transcribed so that I could work on my
Romanian with interesting content. With Ukrainian, I go to Радіо Свобода that
and Радіо Свобода actually is more impartial than most Ukrainian stuff.
vis-à-vis Russia. You would think this is the U.S.. propaganda organ
that they're going to be anti-Russian. They will actually be more critical of
Ukraine, of problems in Ukraine, of corruption in Ukraine, of politicians.
This is Radio Free Europe?
Radio Free Europe.
And, the advantage there is I have podcasts that I subscribe to there's a
Свобода Сегодня, ранокова свобода, then there's ваша свобода
There's like three or four of these podcasts and ваша свобода typically is an
interview with someone and they cover some of the same ground that's covered
in there either the morning svoboda or the today svoboda
So you're getting the same stuff and from different sources, which helps,
and ваша свобода interviews very often are available from the... I
subscribe to the podcast but the interview text is available on their
website
so I'm able to get the transcript. So, rather than paying people to transcribe
Hromadske Radio, I just took the Радіо Свобода where there were transcripts,
slammed him in LingQ and that was a major part of getting up to speed and
it's like you will get to where you understand Ukrainian very well
within a couple months
Awesome. So basically what I should look out for is a similarity in vocabulary
and grammatical structure because they're two cognate languages
(they're from the same language family) and then i'm going to... my motivation is
very clearly defined so that won't be an issue and also we're going to be we
actually happen to have similar interests in terms of the content so all these
resources that Steve was just outlying for me personally are great resources
because I'm also very interested in the political situation in Ukraine and of
course finally I'm going to be there in beautiful Lviv and I'm going to have all
Ukrainians native speakers around as resources.
And you mentioned
Lviv. I started Google ebooks, you know, looking for e-books there's a wonderful
book about Lviv, about different largely Jewish literary figures who grew up in
the Lviv of the nineteen thirties and of course Lviv of the nineteen thirties...
and then he goes back
into a Lviv, Lemberg was sort of an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and then Polish Lviv and the interaction of the different peoples stuff like that
and I'll send you these links. It's wonderful material that I brought into
LingQ and studied.
Looking forward to all that. Apparently I have a lot of work and reading to do!
Enjoyable reading!
A lot of great motivational material for me there.
Thanks a million Steve for the advice on Ukrainian and it's bye-bye from
Vancouver in Canada, got an amazing view of the city out there.
Goodbye and thank you for visiting us.