Knowing Ukrainian can help you in learning Russian, Polish or any other slavic language. What does the study program include? The study program includes several aspects: learning words, grammar, reading texts.
Can you understand Russian if you speak Ukrainian?
Ukrainians understand Russian much better than Russians can understand Ukrainian (actually, few of them can), which can explain a lot. This asymmetry is great evidence that similarity is insufficient to understand both languages equally. Moreover, it says a lot about the political influence of Russia in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian language is easier to learn than Russian, as Russian has more complex grammar. Learning Ukrainian also makes it easier to learn other Eastern European languages, as it is closer to Czech, Slovak, and Polish. Whereas, if you learn Russian, you can understand fewer languages naturally.
Ukrainian and Russian share roughly 55% to 62% lexical similarity, which is not enough to make them mutually intelligible—no more than an average English speaker could automatically comprehend Dutch. In practice, Ukrainian and Russian have vocabulary differences that can quickly confound a non-native speaker.
As of 2022, 81% of the population of Ukraine speak the Ukrainian language in their personal life, at the same time 34% speak Russian, meaning that significant portion of Ukrainian residents constituting 19% of people speak both languages regularly.
On 13 July 2023, the Kyiv City Council prohibited the usage of "Russian language cultural product" in the city of Kyiv. This includes performance of all Russian language product including books, music, and films, in public.
In terms of vocabulary, the Ukrainian language is the closest to Belarusian (16% of difference), and the Russian language to Bulgarian (27% of difference). After Belarusian, Ukrainian is also closer to Slovak, Polish, and Czech than to Russian – 38% of Ukrainian vocabulary is different from Russian.
From the point of view of spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn, the other three languages in the East Slavic branch.
According to the survey, Russian is used at home by 43–46% of the population of the country (in other words a similar proportion to Ukrainian) and Russophones made a majority of the population in Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine: Autonomous Republic of Crimea — 77% of the population. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast — 32%
How long does it take to learn Ukrainian fluently?
To be frank, there are languages out there that are much easier and which you'd be able to learn much faster than Ukrainian. The US Foreign Service Institute classes it as a category 3 language which takes students 1100 hours to learn on average (in optimal situations).
How to hear the difference between Russian and Ukrainian?
Russian has fewer 'soft' consonants. Russians pronounce the 'o' as an 'a', whereas Ukrainian pronounces the 'o' as an 'o'. The Ukrainian “И” and “Е” represent different sounds compared to their Russian equivalents, “Ы” and “Э”. Russian doesn't have a sound for “Г г.”
The reports say that the Russian language is 400 years older than Ukrainian, which generally arose in the 16th-17th centuries under the influence of the Polish language. This case was considered by the fact-checkers of the Myth Detector project, who explained that such a thesis is unfounded.
Learning Ukrainian has been a much gentler experience than learning Russian, partially because Ukraine is especially dialectically diverse, with many in Ukraine speaking neither Russian nor Ukrainian but rather Surzhyk – a creative mixture of both languages that differs from person to person.
I'll also list the top resources that have helped me the most to make some real progress. So let's go! How long does it take to learn Russian? The Foreign Service Institute has determined it takes around 1100 hours for native English speakers to reach fluency in Russian.
The hardest Slavic languages for English speakers to learn are often considered to be Czech and Polish. This is due to their complex grammatical structures, extensive use of cases, and challenging pronunciations. Both languages have multiple noun declensions and a synthetic nature that adds to their difficulty.
Which Slavic language is the best to learn? If you're looking to communicate with the most amount of people or have a love for literature, Russian is the best Slavic to learn. If you're looking for the easiest Slavic language to learn, we would suggest Bulgarian with the lack of grammatical cases.
It's Russian, Russian is the most common Language in Russia. This is largely due to the fact that it's the country, as well as the policies of russification by the last several regimes. Tartar is the next most common language with over 4 million speakers. Then Chechan, Bashkir, and Ukranian.
In 2022, most Ukrainians stated that they do not understand the Polish language at all, and some of them understand it a little because it is a Slavic language.
- Ukrainian includes the letters Ґ, Є, І, Ї, and the soft sign (ь) is used differently. - Russian uses letters like Ы, Э, and Ё, which do not appear in Ukrainian. 2. Pronunciation: Ukrainian tends to have a more melodic and softer sound. The vowels are usually pronounced more clearly.
