Mark Kligman
SDLC 111
Dr. Scinicariello
Ukrainian
Learning Journal
The overarching goal of my learning plan this semester is to emphasize and understand the major differences between the Russian and Ukrainian language. With the development of current events on Ukrainian soil, it is apparent that both the Russian and Ukrainian culture is very different. My goal is to learn how history and culture has influenced the differences in both languages and use that insight to my advantage as I further embark on my journey to learn the Ukrainian language.
Week 2
In order for me to better understand the complex features of the Ukrainian language, my language partner and I decided to focus on reading, analyzing and memorizing Ukrainian poetry. My language partner and I both agreed that the memorization of poetry is an effective way of implementing complex language in my speech, since it forces me to understand the context of the material and make sense of words that I am unfamiliar with. The poets that we decided to focus on primarily are: Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka. According to my language partner, the three mentioned artists are considered the most influential to the Ukrainian culture and even language. The three poets were rebellious in their work, since they directly attacked the Russian oppression of the Ukrainian people in their notorious pieces of work. My language partner and I focused on not only reading the work by these artists, but understanding the historic background to ensure full comprehension of their use of irony, alliteration and other various writing techniques. It has not been easy to comprehend complex Ukrainian language, especially since these three artists make an effort to use very distinct and traditional Ukrainian language to differentiate their work from the Russian language and culture as much as possible. Although my knowledge of Russian continues to contribute to my understanding of the text, it has definitely become increasingly difficult to rely on that aspect of my language skills and I am excited to see where this journey takes my abilities in the Ukrainian language.
Week 4
As my learning of the Ukrainian language continues, my language partner and I have noticed that my pronunciation has become an issue that we have decided to focus on a little more. Since the level of language difficulty that we are learning now is far more advanced than last semester, it has exposed some of my weaknesses in the language and put me in a position where I need to overcome these language deficiencies in order to further move on with my learning. My language partner and I have been working on intonation and tone throughout my speech. It has been very difficult and challenging to overcome my deficiency in correct intonation, especially since my language partner makes sure to correct me every single time that I make a mistake in my pronunciation. However, I have definitely been seeing improvements in not only the eloquence of my speech, but more importantly in my level of confidence when I speak Ukrainian. As my language partner put it, Ukrainians express themselves as if they are orators especially if they are passionate about their topic of conversation. Ukrainian is a beautiful language that puts emphasis on descriptive techniques and tone of speech; therefore I have continuously been working on improving my felicity of phrases so that I can better express my thoughts and feelings on a subject matter.
Week 6
Time is passing by and my language partner and I have seen drastic improvements in my language capabilities. Currently, we are focused on weeding out words on my vocabulary that are too similar or even identical to Russian. The Russian language heavily influenced Ukrainian language and therefore over the centuries, some Russian words simply replaced traditional Ukrainian words in regular speech. Poets such as Taras Shevchenko made it their goal to restore the distinction of the Ukrainian language in relation to Russian, specifically through applying pure Ukrainian vocabulary and stressing the relevance of language distinction in their work. My language partner and I wrote out sentences that had an identical meaning but used different vocabulary to get the point of the sentence across. The reason we did this was to practice the application of more traditional Ukrainian speech, which is considered formal and eloquent, opposed to the more colloquial Ukrainian, which makes use of words that are identical in sound and meaning with the Russian language. There are several words that I had not encountered in our previous semester and that are very different from Russian. I have definitely noticed myself putting in effort when making word choices that can be deemed more Russian than Ukrainian.
Week 8
My language partner and I have had fun in our learning of the Ukrainian language and the way it can be perceived, depending on eloquence and application of richer vocabulary. We watched several videos of Ukrainian politics making embarrassing speeches in parliament, where they were frequently confused and embarrassed by their lack of eloquence and application of pure Ukrainian vocabulary. I can relate to the politics, since Russian is the language of choice in the Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine. I can also relate to the politics making speeches, since Ukrainian to Russian, is in a way similar to the relation between English and Spanish, where it is easy to make an assumption of what the correct word is. For example, in Spanish, many words end with the letter “O” and many words are also similar to English, therefore it is easy to simply use an English word and end it with the letter “O”, in order to get the point across in Spanish. Similarly, there are Ukrainian words that are very similar to Russian words and it can be assumed that replacing letters “E” and “O” in that specific Russian word with the letter “I” will translate to Ukrainian. Therefore it is easy to make assumptions on what the correct way of saying a word that is similar in intonation to its Russian counterpart. My language partner and I made sure to go into detail of what words can be considered a hazard for making an embarrassing mistake in pronunciation. We made a list of similar Russian vocabulary words, in order to make sure that I remember the correct formulation of their potentially mispronounced Ukrainian counterparts.
Week 10
It is now past the middle of the semester and my language partner and I are very satisfied with my abilities in the Ukrainian language. We are continuing to study poetry but we have decided to deviate a little bit and dedicate some time to learning how to apply technical terms to bolster my practical ability in the everyday use of Ukrainian. Specifically, we decided to focus on my ability to communicate on a wide variety of present, past, and future events, since I experienced some issues in cohesively talking about events that are beyond the present timeframe. My language partner and I worked on building the structure for my stories, memories and past experiences so that I could express myself sensibly and clearly when reflecting on my past. We also worked on improving my descriptive abilities in terms of expressing human character, personality, and physical traits in order to improve my ability of expressing emotions towards individuals both figuratively and literally. In addition to working on the structure of stories and past experiences, my language partner and I made an effort to improve my capability in defining and expressing my future plans and goals logically. We put an emphasis on making sense of statements, focusing on expressing current issues and explaining how they translate to the decisions I have made that influence and guide my future plans. My language partner and I also dabbled a bit in political discussion and the application of debate terminology to further improve my ability to drive my point through statements.
Week 12
My language partner and I continue to focus our efforts on the practicality aspect of the application of Ukrainian language. With the amount of cultural study and research that I had completed at this point, I believed that it was relevant for me to be able to express my opinion on social and cultural issues that are relevant to Ukrainian people. Therefore, my language partner and I exercised short one on one debates in English, where we would take notes of what our main points were and then attempted to do the same but this time in Ukrainian. This learning method worked very well because I was able to preliminarily identify the terms I would use to support my claim in English, and follow by giving my best try to solidify these points in Ukrainian. Of course, I was very unclear on some terms and had no idea how to make sense of some claims, however because of the English discussion, I was able to identify what was unclear or unknown to me, which made it easier to learn from my mistakes as we went along with the debate. My language partner and I further worked on my ability to support a claim or viewpoint by exercising common day-to-day scenarios, such as returning or exchanging a purchase from a vendor as a result of a mistake or misunderstanding. My language partner would play the role of the vendor and I would be the customer who needs to defend his claim that the product he/she received was not representative of their expectations. We would switch roles as well to make sure that I gained as much exposure to various standpoints and positions as possible.
Week 14
I expressed to my language partner that I wished to improve my professional terminology in terms of being well versed in business aspects, since that is my area of study at the University of Richmond. Although my language partner is not a business student, he expressed that he had a solid background in business terminology. We focused on improving my ability to exchange information on topics within my field of study and interest. Specifically, I worked on expressing myself, in terms of what my professional interests are, as well as the reasoning to why I chose a specific career path and what I aspire to make of myself in that field. In order for me to be better prepared to take on a professional setting, my language partner and I went over some cultural basics, such as common business practices and mannerisms and how they relate to my expression of career choice. We further worked on bolstering my ability to support and construct opinions and standpoints, specifically ones that supported my argument in regards to work-related processes that could potentially benefit my colleagues in the workplace. My language partner further taught me how to acknowledge and react to mistakes in both a professional and social context. This was very challenging since even in English it can be difficult to correctly address a mistake or the mishandling of a situation. Once again, we applied our scenario method where I played the role of an employee who committed a mistake and had to own up to his mistake, while my language partner played the role of the supervisor who addresses the mistake made by the employee. We practiced the scenario method multiple times, playing out social scenarios as well where I learned how to express regret, sympathy and responsibility through my speech.
Week 16
On our last week, my language partner and I decided to perform a culmination of what I had learned throughout the semester. We decided that we would have a debate on the currently ongoing crisis in Ukraine that is heavily influenced by Russia. My goal was to apply what I had learned from the historically relevant poetry works by prominent artists such as Taras Shevchenko, Panteleimon Kulish, and the Ruska Triytsia. On top of applying my cultural knowledge, I was also responsible for being able to exchange factual information about social and environmental questions that surfaced as the result of the crisis. This was a very difficult task, as I had to pull together everything that I have learned not only this semester, but last semester as well. Clarity of thought and clarity of expression are two very different aspects of a debate and I definitely learned to make use of my thoughts through applying them in speech but I did struggle at times with wording and phrasing of sentences. I was put on the spot and I had to dig deep into my knowledge of the Ukrainian language to answer some of the concerns that had been raises by my language partner. In other words, this exercise taught me how to explain myself, as well as my viewpoint, in a setting where I was given the opportunity to express my take on a certain matter. Although I stumbled quite a bit, there were moments of brilliance where I was able to eloquently explain and ratify my opinion without resorting to Russian speech or mispronouncing a word. We have achieved a lot this semester and I have learned to define and defend my persona in the Ukrainian language, which is something I am proud of and excited about. I can confidently state that I have learned to express my true self appropriately in a given setting and that I am culturally conscious of the Ukrainian language and culture in relation to history.
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