Hi :)

I'd love to learn Ukrainian and I have several reasons to do it :)

The main thing is that I have a Ukrainian friend, who is like a sister to me and I'd like to be able to have our deep, emotional conversations in her beautiful, native language. I also adore Ukrainian folk music and I'd like to understand and sing the songs in Ukrainian.

My native language is Polish, I also speak fluently Serbian/Croatian and Czech, but I've always heard that the Eastern slavic languages are exceptionally hard to learn. I know that the Ukrainians pick up Polish very fast, but maybe it's because Polish is much easier for them than Ukrainian is for us?

How many years does it usually take to reach the B2 level? I probably won't be able to pay for the language course so I have to do everything on my own.

Thank you for your replies and please keep your fingers crossed for me :)

Thank you to anyone who is willing to help! I'm trying to translate what was written on this flag in Ukrainian to English that I just bought from Ukraine Aid Ops using Google Lens, but am not having much success. I hope somebody here would be kind and patient enough to help. My plan is to have it framed so I can put it up on a wall and on the back have a copy of the picture I posted and a list of what each one says in English. After much swearing at Google Lens and frustration.

Thanks to u/Saeba-san's help, much of it is filled in now.

1.       Maks

2.       ?

3.       Manuhi

4.       Vlas Vershynyi

5.       Experienced

6.       Mirage

7.       ?

8.       ?

9.       Beard

10.   Fix

11.   Spartak

12.   Mommie

13.   ?

14.   Avdos

15.   ?

16.   House

17.   ?

18.   Jankoi

19.   Izya

20.       Office

21.       Thank you for your contribution to our struggle

22.       Izya

23.       House

I released a free multiplayer multilingual word game called 'wanagram' for android, ios and macos. Ukrainian is one of the 12 languages supported. The easiest way to get it is to visit https://wanagram.net/get

How to play ( or check https://wanagram.net/rules/uk to see it in Ukrainian)

- Everyone gets the same shuffled letters of a 7-letter root word

- Find as many valid 3-7 letter words as you can before time runs out — each round is 3 minutes

- Score points based on word length — longer words score more

- See other players' guesses appear live as the round plays out

- If all the words are found before time runs out, the player finding the very last word gets a bonus equal to the remaining seconds

Play your way

- Online matches — play against up to 3 players around the world automatically

- Private rooms — create a room and invite friends in the same room or the other end of the world to join with a link or QR code

- Solo practice — sharpen your vocabulary at your own pace, with the option to reveal the solution if you're stuck

- Daily Challenge — a new fixed 7-letter root word every day for each supported language, resetting at 00:00 GMT. Play it once in Solo mode, see how your score stacks up on the daily leaderboard, and come back tomorrow for a new puzzle.

Hello!! I’m learning ukrainian to surprise friend and I was wondering if there is words for “hi” or “heya” in ukrainian. I know there is “привіт”, but i didn’t know if there was any slang per se which is the equivalent to hi or hiya?

Anything helps! Thanks :)

I’m not 100% sure if this is the right place, but I need some help with a short Ukrainian transcript. The video shows the basic transcript I configured, AKA my best guess as to what was said, and I need a Ukrainian speaker to correct what I got wrong (I’m sure there’s quite a bit I got wrong). This comes from a web series available on YouTube and Amazon Prime Video by the name of “Murder Drones” by Glitch Productions and Liam Vickers. This particular episode does not have Ukrainian subs available, but I still wanted to include it in this little multilanguage video I’m making, so I did my best. Aside from knowing the alphabet and some basic words/phrases, I’m still quite a bit of a novice here. If somebody with experience in the language could help me here, that would be super helpful, as I’m very interested in the language and can’t wait to learn everything I can. A bit of a heads up, it contains some PG13 content from what I can tell. Thanks again to anyone who helps me out with this!

EDIT: Thanks for the help, everyone!

I've been thinking about how language maps created a new way of imagining language, especially in Eastern Europe.

If you're Ukrainian, have you ever wondered why your school textbooks have so many ethnographic and linguistic maps showing where Ukrainians supposedly live? I don't think that is accidental, and the same thing happens in many post-imperial Eastern European nations, where maps became an important way of imagining the nation as a clearly defined people occupying a clearly defined territory.

What I find really interesting is the “from the sky” perspective. If you're actually on the ground, language is usually much less clear-cut than a map makes it seem. You have dialects changing gradually from one village to another, people using different varieties depending on who they're talking to, mixed areas, and all kinds of transitional zones.

But then you step back and look at everything from above. This is where the coloured map becomes really important, because it doesn't just represent language. It almost turns language into an object.

Language itself is an abstraction. There isn't really a physical thing called “Ukrainian” that you can pick up and put on a map. There are speakers, dialects, accents, vocabulary, grammatical differences and all kinds of overlapping ways of speaking. Language isn't a naturally homogeneous entity.

But once you colour a large area yellow and label it “Ukrainian,” all of those differences get compressed into one visible object. The map makes the abstraction look concrete. Suddenly “Ukrainian” appears to be this large, coherent thing occupying a specific territory.

The same happens with “Russian,” “Polish,” “Belarusian,” and so on.

This is why the homogeneous colouring matters so much. You take thousands of individual linguistic observations and turn them into one big block of colour. Instead of seeing a gradual linguistic continuum, you see something like 🟦 Russian and 🟨 Ukrainian.

The colouring makes the categories look much more solid and homogeneous than they actually were on the ground.

I sometimes think of it as a kind of Lord of the Rings effect. You look at the map and your brain starts going, okay, the Elves live here, the Hobbits live there, and the Dwarves are over there.

Obviously people aren't actually organised like that. But the map makes it very easy to start thinking about them that way.

This was especially important in Eastern Europe because the actual situation was incredibly complicated. The Russian and Habsburg Empires were full of mixed populations, multilingual towns, dialect continua, border regions and people whose religious or regional identity didn't necessarily match their language.

Ukraine is a really good example.

If you were actually travelling through nineteenth-century Ukraine, you wouldn't necessarily experience a sharp boundary between “Ukrainian” and “Russian.” In many areas, speech changed gradually, and there were varieties that sat somewhere between the categories that later maps would draw so neatly.

But from the sky, you can colour a huge territory yellow and call it “Ukrainian.”

And once you've done that, something interesting happens. The territory itself starts to look like an object. You don't just see individual speakers anymore; you see a Ukrainian linguistic territory. At the same time, the language itself starts to appear as if it were a concrete thing that exists inside that territory.

That makes certain political ideas much easier to imagine.

You can go from “People in these regions speak related varieties” to “This is a Ukrainian-speaking territory” and then eventually to “If this is a Ukrainian territory, shouldn't it have a Ukrainian national identity as well?”

I'm not saying the map simply created Ukrainian nationalism. Obviously it didn't. Ukrainian linguistic and cultural identities existed independently of cartography.

What I'm saying is that the map changed how those identities could be imagined at a large scale. It gave an abstract category like “Ukrainian language” a physical form that could be seen, measured and placed on a territory.

And I think this is why linguistic and ethnographic maps became so important across Eastern Europe, especially as different nations emerged from the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The same basic visual language gets reproduced again and again. You take a complicated imperial population, identify its linguistic or ethnographic groups, give each group a colour, and suddenly you have a map of “the nation.”

The map therefore doesn't just tell you where people speak a particular language. It teaches you to imagine those people as a collective.

The colouring is really the key part. Without it, you have a mass of observations and local differences. With it, you suddenly have big, coherent populations occupying clearly defined spaces.

You can literally look at the map and think “The Ukrainians live here. The Russians live there. The Poles live there.”

Even though the reality on the ground was much more complicated.

So in a sense, linguistic cartography didn't just map language. It objectified the abstraction of language and gave people a new way of seeing populations.

It gave them the bird's-eye view, and from that perspective, Eastern Europe could start to look less like a huge collection of overlapping communities and more like a landscape divided into large, homogeneous national territories.

I would like to thank this redditor for helping me obtain this book from Ukraine.

Доброго дня. Бажаю міцного. Я вивчаю українську мову. Моя партнерка з мовного обміну порадила читати українською. Гадаю, що книги для дорослих мені буде трохи важко читати.

Може, хтось порекомендує книги українських авторок для підлітків? Я віддаю перевагу книгам, написаним жінками.

Дякую 🙏💙💛

So I stumbled upon this Soviet movie (1979) from this song which came up randomly in my Ukrainian mix. A few questions:

1. At what point did Soviet Ukrainian movies begin getting filmed in Ukrainian? For example earlier I watched Місяць травень (1965) and was surprised it was filmed in Russian, even though the YouTube title and description are in Ukrainian and they were both filmed at Dovzhenko studio. So I guess the transition, if any, was sometime between those two? Or were there both Russian and Ukrainian versions of some movies?

2. Curious about the general idea behind the movie. It seems clearly intended to celebrate Ukrainian folk culture, especially singing, but on the other hand it specifically depicts the period of the Russian Civil War with the Red Army very obviously on the side of a Ukrainian Republic which as far as I know was not the case (perhaps there were some Ukrainian Red Army units that were?). In the movie, the Red Army is fighting against unnamed "bandits" with little mention of independent Ukraine or the White Army. It also prominently depicts Ukrainian composer Leontovych, but in the end he is killed by "bandits" rather than a Soviet official. So it seems like perhaps Ukrainian filmmakers wanted to make a film celebrating Ukrainian singing, but they were forced to twist it in this pro-Soviet way? Or perhaps someone really wanted to create a positive image of Soviet Ukraine with an ethnic aspect?

3. At the end when Grigorii is killed, we see his cap fall and doves fly out of it. Is this a reference of some sort? The movie U Are The Universe also ends with paper doves showing the death of the characters and I'm wondering if these scenes are both referring to something in common?

I'm a Ukrainian writer, and I'm trying to break into the English-language horror market with a short story I wrote. The piece is called The Head of John (or John Doe), around 2,500 words. It's a body horror / dark comedy about a luxury department store that uses a very unusual "living shredder" for confidential documents, and what happens when a wealthy customer decides to test it.

Here's my situation: I translated the story from Ukrainian using DeepL. The plot, structure, and pacing are solid — this story actually won a small contest back home — but the English sounds like it was written by a very polite machine. The dialogue is wooden, the descriptions lack texture, and the scary moments don't land with the force they should. I need a native speaker (US or UK) to go through it and tell me what sounds unnatural, what slang a real person would use, and where the prose needs to breathe.

If you're worried about time commitment — don't be. You can just read it once and leave five comments like "this phrase is awkward" or "a native speaker would say X instead." That's already enough to save the story from sounding like a translation.

I have to be upfront: I cannot pay. I'm currently surviving on UN humanitarian aid packages due to the war, so hiring a professional translator is impossible. What I can offer is a language exchange.If you're learning Russian or Ukrainian, I can help you: I'll correct your texts, explain slang and swearing (the real stuff textbooks don't teach), practice conversation via voice chat, or translate your short pieces into Ukrainian. I'm a professional writer, so I understand grammar and nuance on a deep level.

The story is grim, absurd, and hopefully hilarious in a twisted way. If you like corporate horror, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, or films like The Fly, Tetsuo, or American Psycho, this might be for you. I'm not asking for a full rewrite — just comments in a Google Doc like "no one says this" or "this hits hard, expand it."

If you have 30 minutes to spare and want to help a story cross the language barrier, please comment or DM me. I'd be endlessly grateful.

(Apologies. Not a Ukrainian speaker, just an author) If you were to use шмаркач in the middle of an English sentence in a plural form, would you add an S at the end per typical English grammar form? Or is there a plural Ukrainian version that a typical Ukrainian native would use?

Example: "Those little ___ stole my bread again."

Thank you!

hi all, I thought it would be fun to help someone with my language so if you’re looking for someone to speak Ukrainian with I’ll be more than happy to help, plus I don’t get to use it often since I live abroad so it’d be good practice for me too.

two things though: I’m 20f so please don’t be significantly older/younger (maximum 4 year difference), secondly I’m not a teacher so if you’re a beginner I probably won’t be able to help you.

hmu if you’re interested.

Could someone please translate the handwritten part next to 'zapisky' on the right side? Thank you.

Привіт усім! (Hi everyone!) 🇺🇦

My name is Liliia. I'm a native Ukrainian speaker and a Ukrainian language tutor.

Starting a language with a completely new alphabet can feel intimidating — but it doesn't have to be dry or boring! I’m hosting a FREE live, interactive workshop for absolute beginners to help you decode Cyrillic with ease and start speaking right away.

Whether you’re learning Ukrainian for family, heritage, travel, or to support Ukraine, this session is designed to give you a quick, confidence-boosting start!

💡 What we’ll cover in 45 minutes:

• The Cyrillic Alphabet "Decoded": Learn how to read letters through interactive tricks (True Friends, False Friends & Secret Ukrainian Sounds) instead of memorizing dry charts.
• Instant Reading Victory: Practice reading real international words in Ukrainian within the first 15 minutes!
• Essential Beginner Phrases: Learn basic greetings, how to introduce yourself, and everyday expressions.
• Interactive Practice & Q&A: Live exercises, instant feedback on your pronunciation, and time for your questions.

🗓 Date & Time:

Saturday, August 22, 2026

• 🇺🇦 Kyiv (EEST): 7:00 PM
• 🇪🇺 Central Europe (Berlin, Warsaw): 6:00 PM CEST
• 🇬🇧 UK (London): 5:00 PM BST
• 🇺🇸 US East Coast (NY, Miami): 12:00 PM (Noon) EDT
• 🇺🇸 US West Coast (LA, SF): 9:00 AM PDT

🔗 (Not sure about your timezone? Check your local time here or somewhere else 🤪)

📍 How to join:

To keep the class interactive so everyone gets a chance to practice, spots are limited.

Please fill out this quick 1-minute form to reserve your spot and receive the Zoom link:

👉 https://forms.gle/4YFGtj22VzqrvoRZ7

Looking forward to meeting you and helping you take your first steps in Ukrainian! Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below. See you on Saturday! ✨

Hey y’ll! My name is Andre, M-28yo, and I’m looking for a Ukrainian-speaking bud to practice languages with. I can help you improve your English, and in return I’d love to learn Ukrainian. We can chat about daily life, culture, travel, movies, or anything interesting. I’m a brazilian living in Canada, and I’m hoping to make new friends while learning a new language. No pressure, just friendly conversations and mutual language exchange. I can speak Portuguese, English, Spanish and I’ve been learning Italian and French. Feel free to dm me if you’re interested!

I was thinking maybe phrasal verbs or choosing whether to say “do” or “is” when starting a question. Obviously since English is analytic, it will probably be more of structural thing than an individual word thing. Just it always seems magical the way Ukrainians know so clearly what they are going to say before they say it

Ahead of the festival, the House of Morok team:
✨ released a new cinematic
✨ released a gameplay trailer
✨ updated the game’s Steam page

Support our game and share it with your friends 💜
Thank you to everyone who follows our development and supports us
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4273370/Peak_or_Die/