Sunday, July 9, 2017

Learning Ukrainian - First steps

Problem
Ukrainian is in the Cyrillic script like Russian.
How do I learn the letters?
How do I type them?
How do I recognise and remember Ukrainian words?

Answers
I searched on the internet for a website with a Ukrainian keyboard and found yluhovy.com

UKRAINIAN KEYBOARD
With the help of a family member I downloaded the ap and found keyboard on my laptop and installed it. I now have the Ukrainian flag symbol in the list of flags which coma up as options in a drop down box when I clock on the UK flag for British English keyboard.

So far, so good. But how do I know which letter on my keyboard to type to get the Ukrainian equivalent.

My first thought was to type the English alphabet. But I didn't know what the Ukrainian equivalents were, nor where to find them.

QWERTY
So I typed out querty, the top line of my UK keyboard.

The only trouble was I had just clicked on the Ukrainian, so I got all the Ukrainian letters first, then the English keyboard.

My first thought was to type the Ukrainian letters followed by the English not he same line.

However, typing the Ukrainian underneath the Qwerty, or above, made comparison of one letter and another easier for learning easier. It was also easier to find the equivalent letter to type it.

I looked at the three lines and thought that was too many letters together and too muddling for my eyes. So I typed it again, larger, with the three keyboard lines separated by a space.

I printed it out, intending to cut out the largest version and stick it only my laptop.

Display
If you don't want to deface your laptop, you could make yourself an upright card, or even a card the size of a business card and display it in a business card holder, or the top of a business card box.


Now it is easy to see which letters are identical: Most of the vowels: aeio .
A few consonants: KXM.

Some letters are almost the same.
бb
тt

Story
I want to visit Ukraine because my late father's grandfather came from Ukraine and I am writing a novel inspired by research into my family history, based on the city of Lemberg, as it was known under the Austro-Hungarian empire. The city of Lemberg is also known as Lvov or Lviv.

Tips

Ukrainian - English
The Ukrainian word for son looks like sin, but spelled with a C to start. C pronounced S the same as in the English words place and p a l a c e and p o l i c e . The son who sins.

The Ukrainian word for garden looks like sad, starting with the letter c for sad. The garden is sad.

The word for juice looks like sick, shortened to SIK, starting with the letter c for S.   The juice is sick or made me sick.

Not very pretty pictures, but effective in teaching me to recognize and remember the words and the letters.

More Tips On Languages
www.duolingo.com

Video on numbers:
https://www.linguajunkie.com/learn-bulgarian

Flights to Ukraine
https://www.cheapflights.co.uk/find-flights/to-Ukraine/

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. I have many more posts and tips on learning languages, also travels to Cambodia, Italy, Romania, the UK, USA and the world. Please share links to your favourite posts.

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