Following a reporting trip to Ukraine in October 2022, the author began taking weekly video-call lessons in the Ukrainian language with a teacher named Olha, initially based in Ivano-Frankivsk. What started as a gesture of solidarity and a way to better understand the country evolved into a deeply challenging linguistic journey intertwined with the reality of an ongoing war.
Learning the Cyrillic alphabet and the unique characteristics of Ukrainian—such as the distinct letter Ї and the hard Ґ—proved both fascinating and difficult. The grammar presented immense hurdles, including three noun genders, seven case endings, and complex “verbs of motion” that require speakers to specify whether movement is on foot or via transport, and whether it is directional or round-trip. This process repeatedly humbled the author, inducing feelings of panic and vulnerability akin to losing one’s place in a chamber music quartet, though native speakers met even poor attempts at Ukrainian with gratitude.
Crucially, the war inevitably permeated every lesson. Introductory exercises reflected Olha’s displacement from Kyiv, while grammar and pronouns were taught using sentences about Vladimir Putin, military preparations, and the necessity of weapons. The author’s vocabulary expanded to include terms for drones, rockets, explosions, and bomb shelters. Discussions and readings during lessons and a later intensive language course in Lviv touched upon wartime hardships, blackouts, the loss of cultural figures such as novelist Victoria Amelina, and poems capturing the jarring coexistence of mundane life and conflict behind the lines.
Over four years of study, the author encountered the complexities of Ukrainian sociolinguistics, including the post-invasion shift among many Ukrainians away from the Russian language as a form of decolonisation, contrasted with others navigating personal ties to their mother tongue. Although conversational fluency remained slow to develop, the progression in the language ultimately served as a marker of time passing against the backdrop of a prolonged and painful war.
