‘The war leaked into every lesson’: learning Ukrainian in a country under siege
Soon after my first visit to Ukraine four years ago, I began language lessons. It taught me more than I ever expected Almost as soon
Soon after my first visit to Ukraine four years ago, I began language lessons. It taught me more than I ever expected Almost as soon as I returned from my first reporting trip to Ukraine, in October 2022, I decided to start Ukrainian lessons.
Not as an act of solidarity, exactly, but as a marker that I was committed to returning. I wanted to know some Ukrainian in order to feel less helpless, to edge towards a better understanding of what I was reporting, and to be more courteous to those whom I encountered.
And I hoped, in time, to be able to pull myself through a piece of poetry in the original. I began meeting Olha, my teacher, by weekly video call later that autumn. She was in Ivano-Frankivsk, her home town in the far west of Ukraine, I was in London.
With endless patience and humour, she led me by the hand through the unfamiliar letters of her language, those elegant, sensuous shapes of the Cyrillic alphabet. Continue reading...
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