How I Learned Ukrainian (1)
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
