Hi, this is Steve Kaufmann here.
Uh, today I want to talk about how I learned Ukrainian.
Now, I have been doing most of my videos in my little studio, but today I'm going
to do it in front of this painting.
And I'm going to tell you why, but first of all, if you enjoy my
videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications.
And if you follow me on a, a podcast service, please leave a comment.
So before I get into talking about how I learned Ukrainian, I'll explain why I'm
doing it in front of this painting here.
This is a print, of course it's not an original.
It is uh...
[The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum].
Painted by...
painted by van Gogh, van Gogh in English, the famous Dutch impressionist painter.
And I like doing it in front of this picture because it has the Ukrainian
colors, the blue and the yellow plus I very much liked this print and, you know,
van Gogh, van Gogh was a Dutch painter.
He spent a lot of time in France, Southern France, also in Normandy.
And as someone that is interested in languages, you won't be surprised to
know that I kind of like the mixture of cultures and even in food, you
know, Olive oil with my sushi or a wasabi with my French food or whatever.
I like mixing things.
And similarly, I like mixing cultures and I like the way one
culture leads you to another.
Uh, and by exploring all these different cultures, you learn
more and more about the world.
And my discovery of Ukrainian and Ukraine is a good example.
So, for most of my life, I knew next to nothing about Ukraine.
I think like a lot of people, I thought it was some kind of appendage
to Russia, similar to Russia.
And I didn't know much more than that.
Uh, in 2000 and I would say six or seven, I started learning Russian,
uh, largely to see whether I could learn a Slavic language with all
the complicated grammar uh, without spending a lot of time on grammar.
So that was...
that plus having read, you know, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in my late
teens, I thought it would be cool to read it in the original Russian.
So I was with Russian, learning Russian, enjoying Russian, listening to Russian
audio books, reading on LingQ and, um, of course in 2008 there was the war
in Georgia, which I followed because I followed Ekho Moskvy much to the
disappointment of many Russians who are caught up in the sort of propaganda
world that has been created in Russia...
They're the only good people in the world, everybody else is mean to them.
And Ekho Moskvy was kind of tolerated as sort of a safety
valve for a variety of opinions.
A lot of these opinions were critical of the government, but you also had the
communist party would be interviewed and the, you know, whatever his name was.
I can't remember...
can't remember and, um, extreme, uh, imperialists types, like, uh, I
think it's a Prokhanov was on there.
At any rate, so Russia invaded Georgia.
I didn't pay much attention.
2010, there was an election in Ukraine and Yanukovych won.
And of course the Russians were following that very closely,
but still it was all far away.
I didn't pay much attention.
Then in 2014, Russia took Crimea and I watched that and somebody
told me that I could follow these events on Ukrainian television.
So I started watching a program called Shuster Live and lo and behold,
on Shuster Live half the people speak Russian or spoke Russian,
half the people spoke Ukrainian.
And as I was listening to the Ukrainian, I felt as though I
should be able to understand it, but I couldn't understand it.
Very strange feeling because it's pronounced in many ways, kind of
sounds like Russian, but in fact, so many of the words are different.
So, uh, I decided that I would learn Ukrainian.
And, uh, the, I bought some books on...
Starter books and also a radio free Europe, uh, out of Prague, uh, was
putting out Rádio Svobodná in Ukrainian put out regular interviews, um,
where they had both audio and text.
So knowing Russian and, and what I discovered was that like half the
words are like 60% of the words are like Russian, and so if I had, you
know, audio material with transcript, then I could import that into LingQ.
And very quickly I could acquire new words.
I think my vocabulary count on LingQ in Ukrainian is like 50 or
60,000 known words, because so many words you can guess what they mean.
A few of you have to learn.
And I just listened.
I can imagine...
I think I've read one and a half million words of Ukrainian on LingQ.
I don't know how many hours I've listened to.
In fact, I'll show you, uh, in fact, let me show you my profile in Russian,
which shows that I began around 2007, and then you'll see my profile on Ukrainian,
which shows that I began around 2014.
And you can see where I have been most active in those languages.
So listening to all this stuff and also Hromadske Radio which
is a very good source of audio of podcasts, but without transcript.
So it was only after training myself on the Radio Free Europe material
that I was good enough to understand a lot of the podcasts on Hromadske
Radio, most of which were in Ukrainian, some of which were in Russian.
So I was able to follow the events in the Donbas, but let's go back to Crimea.
So I followed the events there.
Uh, initially Russia claimed that the little green men with no military
insignia were not their soldiers, which of course was not true.
Uh, Putin subsequently admitted that yes...
you know, at first he said, oh, they just...
Those are just people who went and bought military, uh, uniforms at some store.
Uh, and then he admitted that they were in fact Russian soldiers and the events
in Crimea were planned by a group of agents who subsequently went to the Donbas
and took what was a, quite a volatile situation and turned it into a war.
And I followed this, uh, daily.
Uh, I followed it as, uh, you know, the, the people in the Donbas and stepping
back obviously there was a lot of tension.
You could see this at Shuster Live.
You had the representatives of the sort of pro Russian faction.
You had the uh, the, the right wing, more nationalistic types, like the head of
Svoboda you had this guy ... who is a bit of a nutcase, also a right wing extremist.
You had everybody, and you had people who are subsequently, subsequently
identified as being corrupt.
You know, you had the sense of, of Ukraine is full of these people who are very
eloquent and speak with great passion and a tremendous range of opinions,
and then Shuster Live as they speak the people in the audience vote on what
they think of what they're saying there.
So it was obviously a period of tremendous tension because of the
events of the maidan which have brought in, uh, a government, which
was voted by all parties, by the way, uh, which was more pro Western.
It was more sort of pro nationalist, uh, than the previous
government under Yanukovych.
And there were people in Eastern Ukraine.
who didn't want that.
These are people who had voted for Yanukovych, they're guy fled.
So obviously they're upset.
I'm watching this in Ukrainian every day, following it.
If I get my, a podcast from, uh, Radio Svoboda, I've now got a text.
So I'm very interested in the subject.
I'm following it as a, you know, Girkin is the first minister of war for the Dunbas.
They call themselves The Donetsk People's Republic.
Borodai Is the prime minister of The Donetsk People's Republic.
There's a guy called Bessler who is some kind of a sleeping russian GRU
agent that's been living there and he organizes, you know, uh, militia.
And so they go from storming a government buildings to eventually
having some kind of an armed force.
There was a war.
Uh, Ukrainian army is very poorly organized between the Ukrainian
army and volunteers, largely from Eastern Ukraine, they fight back.
They were able to eventually arrive at a sort of a cease fire line after the
intervention of the Russian regular Russian army to prevent the Ukrainian army
from actually taking back that whole area.
There were people killed on both sides, mostly soldiers, Ukrainian
soldiers, Ukrainian government soldiers, volunteers on the Ukrainian side, the
uh separatist fighters on the other side, Russian soldiers from Ossetia
or wherever they came, Yakutia, there was quite a few sort of Mongolian
types there who were, um, shown...
you know, some of them were in hospital with serious, with serious burns.
It's a very unhappy situation.
A lot of people fled, displaced people to other parts of Ukraine,
some fled to Russia, a total death toll is supposedly around 15,000.
I followed it every day.
And so with that my Ukrainian comprehension improved.
Now, uh, I, at some point I said, I should start speaking Ukrainian, very
difficult to do because I'm so used to speaking Russian, but I had a Russian
tutor who was actually from Ukraine.
And so slowly, slowly, I started speaking Ukrainian with her.
She subsequently immigrated to the United States with her husband and family.
Uh, then I found two more tutors, one in Lviv and one in Dnipro.
Uh, the one in Dnipro eventually at some point, uh, with all of the shelling going
on back and forth across the demarcation line and people living, uh, without
gas, without water, I said, I want to do something to help those people.
Uh, my, uh, Ukrainian tutor in Dnipro introduced me to
this small non-governmental organization in a ...which is a
suburb of the city of Donetsk.
And every quarter I sent the money so that they could buy, um, you
know, diapers for old people.
We built, uh, kitchens for school, for a school, a little park.
They did a whole bunch of stuff to improve the quality of life of those people.
I eventually did visit, was very well received.
Kids were singing and dancing and, uh, I got the bread and salt
treatment and, uh, and most people in Eastern Ukraine speak Russian,
but some of them do speak Ukrainian.
So I went there.
I was also in Kiev and then I was in Lviv, which is a wonderful city.
And again, when we're talking about the sort of connections of languages
and peoples one of the other aside from Radio Svoboda, another major source
of my, uh, listening and reading in Ukrainian was the history of Ukraine.
And I have a number of these, um, audio books, eBooks, I in
particular liked lay on it, uh, Leonid Zalizniak.
And so I listened and listened to listen to and read in Ukrainian.
I discovered lo and behold, what I didn't realize that Ukraine had ahistory which
involved the original ... which involved being invaded by the Mongols, which
then involved them being conquered by the Lithuanians who are welcomed by the
Ukrainians because they were pushing back against the Mongols, uh, that eventually
become becomes the Lithuanian, Polish or Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The Poles, uh, but, but there's a whole history of, of interaction
between Ukrainians and Poles.
And so that the vocabulary in Ukrainian is closer to Polish.
I don't know if the Poles influenced the Ukrainian language or the Ukrainians
influenced the Polish language, or they all came from some church Slavonic.
I have no idea, but the fact is that from a vocabulary point of
view, Russian is a bit of an outlier and the Ukrainian and Polish and
even Czech vocabulary are closer.
All of a sudden I began seeing...
you know, and then you have, uh, the Poles were kind of trying to
force the Ukrainians to become Catholic, the Ukrainians resisted.
And there was a whole bunch of unpleasantness resulting eventually
in the Khmelnytsky rebellion where basically everything to the east of
the Dnieper River went over to Russia with a promise of some independents,
which turned out not to be the case.
I only mentioned this because my learning of Ukrainian involved following the
day-to-day events in Ukraine, and also learning a great deal about the history.
And so then when I visited Lviv, so here you are in Lviv.
Again, if we talk about fusion of cultures and so forth Lviv before the
war, before the second world war was 50% Polish, 30% Jewish, 20% Ukrainian
because the Ukrainians speakers lived in the countryside and Lviv, which was
known to the Germans as Lemberg and to the Poles as Lwów was the fourth largest
city in the Austro-Hungarian empire.
And so you see in, Lviv the sort of evidence of these different national
historical religious, you know, buildings there's even an Armenian church there.
Uh, and so again, it's this sort of blending of cultures.
Uh, another thing that I, I firmly believe is that the, our culture
and our language is not in our DNA.
So there are lots of people in Russia who have Ukrainian family names.
That doesn't mean that they're Ukrainian.
There are lots of people in Ukraine who have Russian family names who
may even have Russian parents or grandparents who may even speak Russian.
In fact, half the Ukrainians speak Russian more often than they speak Ukrainian.
From what I can gather, whether it's 50, 50, 60, 40, I don't know.
But those people identify as Ukrainians.
So the DNA is not the issue.
It's, it's what you want to be.
That is the issue.
And that's kind of part of the problem right now that the Russians are not
prepared to accept that regardless of the DNA of individual Ukrainians,
they, in their majority, not all, majority want to identify as Ukrainian,
want to have a separate existence as Ukrainian and their language as well.
And I've never believed that there are great languages and small languages.
Like after Russian I learned Czech.
Czech has 10 million speakers, Russian does a hundred and who knows...
hundred and 80 million speakers.
It doesn't matter.
Um, every language is wonderful.
It's beautiful.
There is no more beautiful language, more important language, greater language.
It's whatever you want to learn.
And as you learn that you discover a whole bunch of things about that
language, culture, place, history that you didn't know before.
That's been my experience with every language that I have learned, and I'm
discovering it now with Arabic and Persian and a little bit of Turkish.
So, uh, you know, it's a little bit of a disjointed rant here following
up on the video where I said we're offering free Ukrainian on LingQ to
anyone who wants to learn Ukrainian and free access to LingQ to all Ukrainian
refugees or residents in Ukraine.
I should point out that that offer is valid for all refugees.
Uh, so I'm hoping that Syrians and Afghans will, uh, take advantage.
Uh, as of today, I think we have 3,600 Ukrainians who have approached support
at LingQ to get free access to LingQ.
I'm hoping that other refugees will also do that.
And we're going to produce tutorials, uh, in Ukrainian and also Sahra at
LingQ can help to provide Farsi, um, version of these tutorials for
Afghan refugees who speak Farsi.
And hopefully we can do the same in Syrian Arabic, or even in standard
Arabic and in Pashto, if we can find people to help us with those versions.
So a bit, again, I tend to wander on these.
I hope that's of interest, a little bit long maybe, but, um, that's
how I got involved with Ukrainian.
I probably forgotten if you, oh, I should...yes.
One of the things I did when I went to Lviv, where I met with my online
tutor Solomia and we set up a system whereby she took me around Lviv.
We visited churches and cafes and cemeteries and all different things
that, you know, monasteries and we would just speak Ukrainian and she would
type up in her little cell phone, all of the errors that I made in terms of
know of usage and phrases and words.
And she would then send them to me by email.
I would import that into LingQ and study it.
So we did that from 9-12.
I go back to my room, I study it, go back to two o'clock and 2-5.
And we did that for five days.
And that is a tremendous way to discover the city of Lviv and
also to work on my Ukrainian.
Uh, so I forgot about that.
Uh, something I would recommend.
In fact, when I was in Kyiv, I was thinking, boy, it would be great to be
able to connect with a tutor and say, look, I want you to take me around Kyiv.
We're going to speak Ukrainian or Russian, whatever the case may be, three hours
in the morning, maybe just morning.
And then I can study all of that and we go back to it the next day
and the next and the next day.
So I want you to do that in Italian and Spanish or Chinese or Japanese,
wherever you are, and sort of integrating that one-on-one contact with a tutor.
And yet then getting the sort of text of, of the problems you had,
studying them on LingQ and going back to it again the next day.
Anyway, thank you for listening.
I hope it wasn't too long.
And, uh, I'll leave you with, uh, a couple of videos where I, um, talk
about Ukaraine and speak Ukrainian.
Thanks for listening.
Bye for now.