Cultural Post 4

[Taylor Johnson]

Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. The letters are completely different from Latin script, and each letter is pronounced with its own specific sound. One of the good things about Ukrainian for a learner of the language is the fact that the language is largely phonetic, which means after you learn the alphabet and the pronunciation rules, there is no reason why you will struggle to spell a word that you hear. Ukrainian uses a ь (soft sign) which influences the sound of the letter preceding it, making its sound soft. Written Ukrainian looks a lot different than printed Ukrainian, and everyone writes in cursive. That meant that I had to learn which cursive letters corresponded to which printed letters. Luckily for me, Ukrainian and Russian cursive is pretty much the same, so I didn't have to relearn very much. However, I remember when I first learned how to write Russian cursive, and that was a frustrating process because the cursive is sometimes very different from the actual printed letters.