Study progress 🙇‍♂️

I’ve been studying Ukrainian for four weeks now. In this fifth week, I’m really hitting the limits of what my mind can absorb. I’ve also had the chance to get to know the new group of people who joined the course last week.

Saying hello and goodbye

At the end of the fourth week, I had to say goodbye to two friends — including my study partner. He skipped week three, returned for week four (in a different group) and ultimately decided not to continue.

Meanwhile, I got to know amazing new people — more US civil service officials, someone from the world of theatre and dance, a Polish professor, someone from Taiwan (and California, and India — in some order) who learned Ukrainian and Bengali in the past — and many other interesting people.

In the third week I had private classes — which sounded more attractive than it turned out to be. In the fourth week, my class was four (and soon five) people! This completely changes the dynamic of the class — for better and for worse. The bad part is the (unavoidable) rearranging of class, dividing attention among more students. We also haven’t all learned the same stuff (yet) — they’re using grammar I hadn’t learned yet, for example. The good part is that we have more opportunities to interact, work, struggle and learn together as ‘equals’ — rather than only interacting with a teacher who’ll always do their part of the conversation perfectly.

My language level

I would assess my skills on the lower end of my class, but I’m not that far behind. I’d say I’m at 85% of the class average. Many of them clearly studied hard before joining the course and it shows — they know a lot of vocab, listen well, and construct long sentences. On pronunciation I’m still doing alright. Previously, my Ukrainian accent was deemed “cute”; I recently got upgraded to “sounding like a Western Ukrainian” (if only I’d speak faster).

Exam?

Last Friday, I may have been a bit overambitious by signing up for an official B1 language exam to be taken next Friday — if I pass, I’d get a language certificate. I got some test exams (for B1 and A2) to orient — they included exercises for listening, speaking, reading and writing. I concluded yesterday that (a) these test is far too elaborate to be enjoyable and (b) I’m just not ready for a B1 exam and (c) I’m not interested in a certificate for A2. So, I canceled the exam.

However, now that I’ve seen what B1 (and A2) language level looks like, I can reflect where I stand. Apart from vocab, I should know most of the stuff — but I’m so slow and I make so many mistakes. If I fix that, I think I’d be at a low B1 level.

I used ChatGPT to review my homework and assess my language level, and it indicates the same — on average I’m at level A2, pushing toward B1.

Ukrainian grammar

I’ve studied Computer Science, which means I know (knew) programming languages, syntaxes, grammars etc. Basically, there’s overlap between what linguists do for human languages and what computer scientists do for programming languages. And I thought I liked grammar — it’s structured, describable, predictable. However…

I must confess I completely underestimated how complex Ukrainian is. English? French? German? Peanuts! Ukrainian has 3 genders and 7 cases. For each gender, for singular and plural forms, for each case the endings of nouns and adjectives can be completely different. This wouldn’t be a problem per se, were it not for a few problems:

1. Some grammar rules follow no logic — just vibes. Like, for (just) the genitive case for (just) masculine for (just) singular words, I must decide whether бутерброд (buterbrod) becomes бутерброду (buterbrody) or бутерброда (buterbroda). There are some heuristics but ultimately it’s vibes. The Ukrainians themselves tend to make mistakes with this. This thing just broke me. Angry vibes! (Or angra vibes?)
2. Vowels and consonants are dropped, added and shifted like scrabble pieces on an ouija board during an earthquake. Take a look at квітка (flower) and квиток (ticket), for example. There’s some beauty to this madness but it’s still madness.

And worst of all, you cannot just say “if I mess up the endings, they’ll know what I mean”. No! Ukrainian doesn’t have propositions for everything, and the case endings are sometimes the only thing that indicate the meaning.

I have already proposed my teacher to reform some parts of Ukrainian. She supported that idea and suggested that I can write a request to parliament — once I reach C1 level. Despite my criticism, I do love the language and learning it.

In conclusion

I have almost two more weeks left. So, two more weeks to solidify Ukrainian grammar in my brain. However, my mind is mush and I just can’t seem to learn anything anymore — it’s like you’re blindly staring at letters and it just doesn’t land. I do believe this is a normal part of the journey, but it’s annoying. I do think I’m still on course to achieve the goals I stated in an earlier blog post, but it’s going to be tight.

Multiple Ukrainians have indicated they think I’m crazy for learning the language. And I believe objectively they’re right — I still don’t know why I want to learn this language, and yet, I know that I want to. There’s something oddly satisfying about defeating this challenge, about being able to interact with the Ukrainian people. Perhaps in two weeks, I’ll be good enough to say goodbye in an eloquent fashion.