Learning Journal 4

[Taylor Johnson]

This week, I wanted to learn how to match personal and possessive pronouns with the correct gender of the words. There are a lot of rules about this in Ukrainian, and it is not as straight forward as in Russian. It took me a lot of practice to start to get the hang of these rules, but once I did, things got a little easier. I also wanted to learn the pronunciation rules of letters within words. In Ukrainian, the way letters are pronounced can be influenced by the other letters around them. Because Ukrainian uses a similar alphabet to Russian, I assumed that the pronunciation rules would be the same. However, after trying to have a short dialogue with my language partner, I discovered that my pronunciation was completely wrong. Ukrainian has an entirely different set of rules about how the letters influence each other, so learning those rules was also a goal this week. To do this, I referred to a Ukrainian grammar book and several different websites with pronunciation examples.