r/europe • u/MarktpLatz Lower Saxony (Germany) • Apr 03 '17

What do you know about... Ukraine?

This is the eleventh part of our ongoing series about the countries of Europe. You can find an overview here.

Todays country:

Ukraine

Ukraine is the largest country that is completely on the european continent. The Ungarian people's republic was founded in 1917, the ukrainian state in 1918. It later became part of the soviet union and finally got independent in 1991. Currently, Ukraine is facing military combat with russia-backed rebels and the crimean peninsula was completely annexed by Russia. Ukraine will host the next eurovision song contest.

So, what do you know about Ukraine?

193 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

735 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

15

u/MrBIMC Ukrajina Apr 04 '17

This is still felt today causing issues in the political integrity of the country/society. I still do not know how insulting it is to address an Ukrainian in Russian, if at all

  1. I can't say it causes political issues, it only appears on the news when some populist party of any vector wants to score some points by forcefully promoting ukrainian or bravely defending russian language against inexistent threat.

  2. In everyday life nobody cares what language you speak. Everyone knows both. Only case when you really have to use Ukrainian is in mandatory Ukrainian class in school and in national exams. And sometimes you also need Ukrainian to fill some legal forms. But that's pretty much it.

Ukrainians seem to be very hardworking and proficient at learning languages

I guess it's a bonus of being raised bilingual. Though I'd say this proficiency mostly applies to other slav languages (i.e. Polish and Czech), learning Romance or Germanic language still feels tough af.

11

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '17

From my personal experience I can say that Ukrainians pick up Portuguese pretty quickly, I'm yet to meet one that didn't have basic fluency, and some spoke really well, and with a very understandable accent. Obviously my experience might be anedoctal evidence, but it's what I've got

1

u/MarsalJosipBrozTito Apr 06 '17

What about serbian?

1

u/MrBIMC Ukrajina Apr 06 '17

The only slavic language that sounds like complete gibberish to me is Bulgarian.

Serbian sounds so familiar, yet all the words mean completely different stuff.