Learning Journal Week Two

[Mark Kligman]

In my second week of learning Ukrainian I have already seen significant improvement from my first day of learning. My language partner and I have now been going over common phrases that I would use as a follow up to the greetings we learned in the prior week. Therefore we have been reenacting several scenarios where I would act as a tourist in Ukraine who is trying to ask for directions to a common facility. I also learned how to apply metrics when asking or providing directions such as: “walk straight for 200 meters and then turn left and continue for 100 meters.” We discussed the flow of Ukrainian conversation and how to transition from greetings to asking for directions so that I better understand the sentence structure in the Ukrainian language. So far, Ukrainian grammar is very similar to Russian and has been a relatively easy topic for me to cover. If I were dropped off in Kyiv, I would be fairly confident that I would be able to address a stranger in a friendly and appropriate manner as well as ask him/her/them/etc. for directions to a common facility such as a bank, library, or hospital.