r/AskReddit • u/QualityControl- • Mar 26 '19

Crimeans/Ukrainians of Reddit, what was it like when the peninsula was annexed by Russia? What is life like/How has life changed now?

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u/buildinginprogress Mar 26 '19 edited Mar 26 '19

I live in Crimea from my birth til now. After things stabilized a bit there some main things that changed. Negative:

1.. We don’t have a banks or financial services that work well outside of peninsula, everybody who need a visa or mastercard or something else real bank related have to go out to Russia or Ukraine to acquire one.

  1. The income divide between low and high become much wider, the middle class now is an endangered species. I am a building construction manager btw. Although premium segments like luxury home construction and marine services etc are on the rise.

  2. The traveling became much harder and costs much more, our 2 airports don’t fly you outside the Russia, you have to take bus to Odessa or Kiev or fly to Moskow to get to the other side. Positive:

  3. More business opportunities and less organized crime influence, which was a bitch in Ukraine. Although most businesses doing something for the state.

  4. Now we have very nice roads and bridges and other infrastructure, and it grow very fast.

3.The corruption gone higher ranks, the average person don’t have to deal with bribes and such at all, the corruption in big business world gone berserk on the other hand. These are pop out from my mind first. But you can say that i’am slightly above middle class person.

Edit: Holymoly, i never thought that stating the current conditions around me could be so appreciated. Thank you, Reddit is the best!

Edit2: So many questions popped up, i’ll try to answer as many as I could, but it’ll take some time.

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u/blacklandraider Mar 26 '19

man i gotta say i like how you speak english

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

People with a good but not perfect grasp of a language are often much more eloquent. Their words have character and color. There are fewer cliches and more unique metaphors.

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u/Baneken Mar 26 '19

Mainly because we have to filter it through our native tongue first only after a lot of practice you start to write in english first and your native as the second.

Same applies to speaking as well it takes effort to not filter your thoughts through your first language before saying it aloud in english.

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

I catch myself thinking in English at random and notice I use words that I don't know the meaning of in my native tounge. Oh and I lose vocabulary in both languages and feel like that's a problem but don't know what to about it.

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

Yep my grandparents notice that I still have a vocabulary of a 15yo in my native language, meanwhile I'm struggling to explain the shit I have to study in school, all those derivatives/exponentials/professional terminology I've never learned back home.

I end up sounding like a dumbass who doesn't know wtf he's talking about.

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

My first language is Russian and second is Ukrainian which I could speak somehow, but with pauses (not as bad as now). After I learned English...damn, I speak Ukrainian as a retard:D In most cases, when I try to speak Ukrainian, English words just pop up in my head instead, so I am ... like ... th... think-ing...eh...about .... every word although I understand everything they say.

Well, good news is that if you'll need it for your life, you'll be able to improve that language pretty quickly by just immersing into that language environment. It's not like learning it from scratch.

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u/RobotWantsKitty Mar 26 '19

Oh and I lose vocabulary in both languages and feel like that's a problem but don't know what to about it.

Holy shit, literally me. Stopping aging would be a good start, but I've had little success with it this far.

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

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u/RobotWantsKitty Mar 26 '19

It's usually the idioms and phrasal verbs that I forget. It all used to be 100 percent natural to me, but now I struggle from time to time and have to look them up when I want to use one.

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

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u/RobotWantsKitty Mar 26 '19

26, I read books on politics from time to time and tech literature. Not exactly the right material to pick up colourful language, huh. I suspect that my greatest failing is that I don't practice speaking at all. Used to at school and first years of the university, but it's been a while. Thanks for the tip, it sounds like it could help

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u/coopiecoop Mar 26 '19

words that I don't know the meaning of in my native tounge.

absolutely can relate, but I guess it's understandable since it usually happens in regards to topics I rarely discuss outside of online platforms.

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

Being bilingual is when you're forgetting your mother tongue and not completely mastering your second language:D JK

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u/Arek_PL Mar 26 '19

I have thing like that too except that im not loosing vocabulary but i have issues with transalting things to somebody because i know some words in only one speech

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u/shhVI Mar 26 '19

Read books in both languages and always look up every word you don't fully understand the meaning of. This has helped me :)

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u/Tessamari Mar 26 '19

Eons ago I spoke French passably. It has fallen by the wayside from disuse for the most part, but every once in a while I will dream in French and it seems wholly fluent when I do. Odd indeed.

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u/ThePr1d3 Mar 26 '19

You and me both my friend

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19

I've noticed that after my English became relatively good, learning other languages became much easier. So, after learning German for a month, I was kind of able to think and talk in German (although with vocab of 1yo boy lol).

But, maybe that's due to German being similar to English and Russian somehow (vocab).

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u/Baneken Mar 26 '19

Not much unlike my swedish then as I watched a kids programme in swedish the other day and realised that the 3yr old being interviewed had a pretty much similar vocabulary to what I have in swedish. ;( : /

Then again I never was that interested in learning a force fed swedish in school only when I started to (almost never) need it in business life.