(this is a table of the Ukrainian alphabet, pronunciation and Russian equivalent)Well, this story is about church yesterday, when we went to our first church service all in Ukrainian. It is surprisingly hard to find a Ukrainian service in Kiev. (Which you may think begs the question: "Why bother with Ukrainian if everyone's speaking Russian anyway?" I'll try to answer that below.)
The church service, as I said was all in Ukrainian, with the exception of one word in Russian. The really cool news is that we understood a very high percentage of what was being said. I'd say we got all the main ideas and many of the actual expressions and individual words.
It seems that after the initial shock over the differences between Ukrainian and Russian what we see more and more are the similarities. What's more, now that we have the patterns of verb conjugations down (forget about the exceptions, which are rich in number and cruelty) many things we can piece together.
So, 'Why bother?' Well, one of the curious things about the Ukrainians we know is that even though the relationship between them and Russia has been close politically, there is no surplus of love for Russia's continuing political influence (and even less for the tendency in Russia these days to turn the clock back, away from the democratic leanings which Ukraine has come to value.) This lack of enthusiasm is also expressed in the positive preference for their own language over Russian- even though most people are at the present time still using Russian.
When we tell them we are studying Ukrainian they consistently use the Russian expression which translates to something like "Good for you!" Our Ukrainian tutor tells us she feels pride to think that we want to study her language.
So we'll keep working on the language in order to keep opening more doors to people's heads and hearts. For today we're encouraged by our experience in church yesterday and look forward to practicing more and more as we gain momentum.
The church service, as I said was all in Ukrainian, with the exception of one word in Russian. The really cool news is that we understood a very high percentage of what was being said. I'd say we got all the main ideas and many of the actual expressions and individual words.
It seems that after the initial shock over the differences between Ukrainian and Russian what we see more and more are the similarities. What's more, now that we have the patterns of verb conjugations down (forget about the exceptions, which are rich in number and cruelty) many things we can piece together.
So, 'Why bother?' Well, one of the curious things about the Ukrainians we know is that even though the relationship between them and Russia has been close politically, there is no surplus of love for Russia's continuing political influence (and even less for the tendency in Russia these days to turn the clock back, away from the democratic leanings which Ukraine has come to value.) This lack of enthusiasm is also expressed in the positive preference for their own language over Russian- even though most people are at the present time still using Russian.
When we tell them we are studying Ukrainian they consistently use the Russian expression which translates to something like "Good for you!" Our Ukrainian tutor tells us she feels pride to think that we want to study her language.
So we'll keep working on the language in order to keep opening more doors to people's heads and hearts. For today we're encouraged by our experience in church yesterday and look forward to practicing more and more as we gain momentum.
2 comments:
I will pray this goes easy for you and I am praising God for you too, that you will get to tutor and likewise "be tutored." Sounds like a fantastic plan. And then too, more friends and contacts too.
Hey, its great that you are geting it down. We will continue to pray for you as you understand more and more each day!
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