Note: There are invidious links / yewtu.be links for those that need to be shielded from the prying eyes of Google.
I won’t speak about the terrible events happening in Ukraine. The suffering of innocent people breaks so many hearts.
The key advice for these times:
In most human crises, donate money.
To dive in and help as an amateur is the worst.
But bringing attention to the situation or crisis, however oblique, is always appreciated as long as it does not clog up lines of communication. E.G. “hash crashing” during a protest can prevent activists from communicating.
I won’t speak about that, but instead I will be going about learning a new language using YouTube, Wikipedia and Wiktionary. My goal will be writing basic words, saying basic greetings and basic introductions in Ukrainian. Can these goals be met with free resources on the Internet?
A language is more difficult to learn the farther away it is linguistically from your bridge language. I use the term bridge language, because often times a person will use their non-native language to learn another language because of a lack of resources in their native language. The bridge language gets you from one language into the one you want to learn, your target language.
My language bridge is English (Tagalog is my mother tongue), and my target language (for the next few weeks) is Ukrainian. Linguistically, it is quite different and far from English. Ukrainian is a Category 3 language where 1 is the easiest and 4 is the hardest. A Category 3 language takes about 1100 hours of class or about 44 weeks of 25 hours of class & study to master. We will try and achieve 110 of 1100 hours, or 10%.
So let’s start with the alphabet. Wikipedia is immensely helpful here.
I found this helpful for learning to write the alphabet, which I write out every day at least 3 times:
And, this was immensely helpful for pronunciation of the letters:
Then practice writing out words from a basic phrase list here:
https://wikitravel.org/en/Ukrainian_phrasebook
A frequency list based off of subtitles in media can be found here: https://github.com/hermitdave/FrequencyWords/tree/master/content/2018/uk
What about Arabic, my loyal readers might be asking. Well, I’m still studying Arabic in class and with tutors. I’ve just added Ukrainian for a week.
To sum up:
- Learn the alphabet. Write it out 3 times a day for a week to really get it memorized well. Honestly, I used to do this with Hebrew and even then have forgotten lots.
- Learn pronunciation from videos.
- Write out Ukrainian using the basic phrase book.
This is 100% more than most Americans (80%) who never learn a 2nd language.
