If you watch someone play sports, you won't become athletic. It's the same with language. Language is a skill, and if you want to really master it, you need to practice. However, not everyone has this goal. In this article, I'm going to analyze various goals for learning Ukrainian and different ways to achieve them.

Goal: “I'm just curious”.

This seems to be the most common. If the culture or history of Ukraine resonates with you, if you find the Ukrainian alphabet and the sound of the language exotic, if you just want to challenge your brain a little and try something new, this is you. I once started learning Hebrew in the same way. I didn't make it beyond the alphabet and a couple of phrases from a phrasebook, but that was enough for me. I am excited when my friends are amazed that I can read Hebrew letters, or when I greet them with a Hebrew phrase on holidays. Also, when I come across a TV show or a commercial in Hebrew, and sometimes I recognize a couple of words, I get excited: “'Oh, really?”

If you have recognized yourself, then for this goal of learning Ukrainian, you just need to watch interesting videos on Youtube from time to time, play with basic words on Quizlet, Memrize, or Duolingo, and use artificial intelligence that generates texts and phrases without much meaning. You can also listen to Ukrainian songs, buy Ukrainian embroidery patterns, or children's books that you may never read, but you will be proud to have a lot of Ukrainian on your shelves.

Goal: “I have relatives and friends from Ukraine, I want to know their language a little bit.”

This goal is more difficult because it is very hard to define what “a little” means. Does “knowing a little bit of Ukrainian” mean saying “thank you” when you are served tea, or does it mean ordering coffee in a cafe in Ukraine, or does it mean being able to talk to your grandmother from Ukraine? If you want to be able to talk to a grandmother from Ukraine, you will have to study for about two years, two or three lessons a week. But to be able to order coffee, 10-20 basic lessons are enough.

Why is it so difficult to talk to your grandmother? Because your grandmother will not adapt her language to the literary “textbook” standards, nor to your “A1 level”, but will speak with a large proportion of dialect and emotional words that you will not find in textbooks even of the C2 level, and she will speak fast and not very clearly.

Therefore, your goal “I want to speak a little Ukrainian” needs to be clarified. After a basic Ukrainian course, you will be able to say simple things about yourself: about your family and work, about your hobbies and home, about your favorite colors and clothes, and so on, because you will know one or two thousand basic words and the basic grammar to connect these words into sentences. However, when Ukrainians start answering you on these topics, you will hardly be able to fully understand them because they will not speak only the basic language. They will use dialect and emotional words, they will speak quickly and in very different ways, depending on the person. It's an illusion to think that at the elementary level we learn to talk about food, and at the C2 level we learn to talk about philosophy and politics. No, at the basic level we learn basic structures and words, and at the C2 level we learn complex ones. You can talk about food in complex phrases and politics in simple ones. Unfortunately, in everyday life, people use both simple and complex constructions to talk about any topic. Even when you just say hello, you can hear very different phrases: «Привіт!», «Прівєт!», «Привітики!», «Привітулі!», «Привітусіки!», «Вітаю!», «Здоров», «Здоровенькі були!», «Слава Ісу!», «Слава Ісусу Христу!», «Добридень!», «Добрий день!», «Доброго дня!», «О, давно не бачились!», «О, які люди!», etc. In a beginner's textbook, you'll only see «Добрий день!», «Доброго дня!» and «Привіт!». So, if you want to know a little bit of Ukrainian (i.e. speak a little about yourself and others, read a little, write a little in Ukrainian, and understand basic, simple, slow phrases), you need to take a Ukrainian language course for beginners. For example, “Подорожі”, “Яблуко”, or “Beginner’s Ukrainian”. These courses will help you learn simple words and basic grammar. It must be a course created by teachers, not AI-generated content. Because teachers know what words and in what forms to teach students at different stages.

By the way, to speak Ukrainian and understand simple things, you need to know up to 70% of Ukrainian grammar.

Goal: “I want to watch movies in Ukrainian and/or talk to my colleagues.”

This is already a level of confident language proficiency. To achieve this, you will have to study Ukrainian for two to three years in formal courses for two to three hours a week, and consume Ukrainian content (read texts, watch videos, etc.) for at least an hour every day. If you want to talk to your colleagues about human rights, you need to read texts and watch videos on this topic. Because the music videos of «Океан Ельзи» will not help you with this. Neither will the Duolingo app. You also need to understand that only lessons without daily consumption of Ukrainian content, or vice versa, daily consumption of Ukrainian content without formal lessons where you learn grammatical structures and so on, will not help you speak Ukrainian confidently.

Goal: “I want to live in Ukraine and communicate in Ukrainian.”

In this case, you need to take formal Ukrainian language courses up to the B2 level, as well as surround yourself with Ukrainian-language content on a daily basis. And be prepared for the fact that even in fully Ukrainian-speaking cities like Ternopil or Lviv, you will hear Russian words in Ukrainian. For example, a bathroom towel rail is called a “полотєнчік” from the Russian word “полотенце” (“рушник” in Ukrainian), although it should be called a “рушникосушка”. And there are a bunch of other things like that. So if you live in Ukraine, you will at least passively learn to understand a little bit of Russian, and maybe a little bit of Polish in the western regions of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian language has borrowings from Polish.

Conclusion

So the way you choose to get to that goal depends on what your goal is in learning Ukrainian. If you want to watch movies in Ukrainian, don't expect that taking a Duolingo course will be enough. But if you're just curious about the Ukrainian language, it's fine if you complete the Duolingo course, cook borsch, and decorate your room with Ukrainian word stickers.