I have been learning Ukrainian on and off for a year and a half now. English is my native language and this is my first L2. I’m currently near 800k words of reading with just over 8k known words and 350 hours of reading (i listen as well, but not on lingq). My average reading speed is about 40wpm over all time, but lately its been closer to 60wpm.
If you’re learning a slavic language as your first L2 and you’re a native english speaker, I’m interested to hear:
Total words of reading
Known words
Hours spent reading (i.e. total hours - listening hours).
Reading speed (both recently and average of all time)
Reason I ask is this feels like an endless process. Everything I read has a ton of blue and yellow. Does it ever get easier? Will there come a time where I just start adding tons of new words per day? Will my reading speed get significantly faster at some point?
I’m supposed to go to Ukraine in ~3 months and I’m freaking out because I still don’t understand anything and I’m not sure how much progress I can realistically make in 3 months.
I’m a native English speaker and just started learning Ukrainian, it’s my first Slavic language, however it’s not my first foreign language, so I won’t give you my stats. I can definitely understand the pain. Part of my issue is the LingQ dictionary is terrible for Ukrainian, for example it doesn’t tell me which case the word is in and instead translates as if it were in nominative, making most sentences seem like nonsense. The sentence level translations seem a lot more correct than the single word translations.
I have studied very hard languages, languages further from English than any Slavic one. It WILL get easier. It IS possible to learn them to fluency. But you are learning a language that takes English speakers (who are learning more or less by themselves, not immersed in the country) on average 5 to 7 years to get fluent in.
I would just throw yourself into it, study as much as you can all day long. Study on the toilet, in the bath tub, in line at the grocery store… Also I would look up a list of Ukrainian affixes and memorize them. For example un-, ex-, non-…. -ly, -wise, -wards in English. Any long word has an etymology that may greatly help you.
I have been learning Russian for 2 years and some change, and I completely understand your feeling of frustration/hopelessness. To preface, I spent a year studying at DLI (40-55ish hours a week of classes and self study). I graduated with a 2+, 2+, 2 which would be similar to somewhere between a B1 and B2. However, even after the year of official study, a year on LingQ including 4 months of regular texting with a native, I still feel absolutely incompetent in the language at times. Slavic languages are tough! That is why I like Steve’s philosophy towards language learning - it takes time and enjoy the process. I highly recommend watching his videos for the motivation.
That being said, here are my LingQ stats:
Total words of reading - 211,936
Known words - 21,106
Total Hours - 253 hours (55 of which are listening). Total Hours are skewed since I’ll occasionally leave lessons open while I go do other things or get distracted.
Reading Speed - Extremely skewed due to the previous reason, but 17-33 words a minute is my low and high on the app.
Like you, I spend most of my time listening elsewhere. I listen to stuff daily with a majority of it being passive listening. Reading is primarily intensive since I have moved towards reading books (Атлант Расправил Плечи is around 32-42% “unknown words” per lesson). Additionally, I’ll speak with Chat GPT around 5-10 times a month.
With all the time I have spent on learning Russian, I can confidently say that I could survive in a Russian speaking country, but there are still many words and phrases that I have not encountered. Reading is my strongest skill followed by listening then speaking. Even at my highest moment, I have never woken up feeling confident in the language. It kicks my ass everyday.
Since you said you don’t understand anything now, you would need to spend at the very least a few hours a day studying/practicing the language before your trip in order to be able to participate in basic conversations. Even if you aren’t able to reach that level, it’ll still be cool to read signs, menus, and say a couple words/phrases to locals you meet. They’ll love it! Stay positive and use it as fuel to continue the language if it is something you are passionate about maintaining long term.
Do what you can, try to enjoy it, and simply give it time to absorb.
I am also learning Ukrainian as my L2. My stats are as follows.
494,000 words of reading
15,446 known words
19 wpm reading speed.
818 hours total study time (however also likely inaccurate due to idle time). For guidance, I have likely averaged around an hour per day for the past year and a half.
From reading the other comments here i see there is quite a variation in peoples stats and (likely) methods. Comparing my stats to you it would suggest I spend more time on each sentence before moving on. I also agree with you that it does seem like an endless process and I thought i would be much further ahead than I am when i started. However what i can say is that I am improving! I used to only be able read the mini stories and am now enjoying slowly making my way through the first harry potter book (intensively looking up every unknown word). I believe the unfortunate truth is as people say…it will take 3-6 years at this pace to get close to fluent. There is not much that can be done about it apart from upping your study time per day which may not be achievable. The key is trying to find a way to enjoy the process and commit to the grind. For me this means finding material which has as much known words in it as possible, right before it becomes too boring. Then with the more known words, the more I can start to build up my speaking practice and get to that picture of fluency. I would also be keen to hear from someone who is learning Ukrainian as their L2 and is closer to the 3-5 year mark. Good luck with your studies!
Hey, I’m an English speaker doing Ukrainian here but it’s not my first slavic language so I don’t think my stats will help you much.
But I do want to say a couple of things:
I’m at about 27k known words. A lot of the blue words I encounter now are different cases/forms of words that I already know (or proper nouns, but that doesn’t really count).
When I was there (in Ukraine), I met a bunch of people who were really happy that I was learning their language. Some of them resorted to pantomime or occasionally defining words in other languages that we both spoke in order to help me out. There was usually someone around who spoke English if we really couldn’t understand each other, although sometimes I had to wait until the person who spoke English was free.
Since you have a trip coming up, you might want to try speaking. I met quite a few people on Tandem who were happy to listen to me stumble through simple sentences in return for my help with their English.
Tutor lessons on italki or similar sites are relatively cheap as well if you’d feel better with someone who’s getting paid to listen to you.
Had 2 years in college. Am now at 47K known words, about 1.1 M words read, and 260+ hours listened.
To find practice material with a higher percentage of known words, I pick news, or YouTubers talking about tech, the internet, psychology of developing good habits, and language learning.
For going on a trip or attending a language meetup, I would listen to simple conversations and short news stories. In Lingq Ukrainian, I would start out with Greetings and goodbyes and Eating out. Then I’d learn the words in a story about food, and listen to the mini stories.
If you get passive comprehension for a bunch of the mini stories, and can get a general idea of what’s going on in news stories, that will get you going.
You might consider spaced repetition flashcards with tourist phrases. Try out a few of the decks at this link, and pick whichever one seems like fun:
dylanc54, you can learn Ukrainian! It is a difficult language. I’ve spent four years learning it and am a solid B2. I very much get fluency feeling far away sometimes. Although this is not my first L2, to give you a sense of my effort so far, I have read over 2 million words on LingQ and over 1 million words elsewhere, and I’ve put about 2100 hours into learning the language. My known words here are 61k+.
However, I have learned another language (Laotian) to fluency in much less time. The difference was that I spoke that language every day, multiple hours a day, so it was a much faster process.
Right now I am also thinking about going to Ukraine in about 3 months, and to improve my fluency, I am speaking and writing nearly every day. I already have 1-2 lessons with natives a week, so I am adding monologuing and chatting with AI. I’m trying for about 50% output every day (while maintaining >400 coins reading on LingQ and other activities). I am sure that if I had done a lot more output sooner, I would be C1+ by now. But the best activity, living in Ukraine, has been out of reach.
I have not studied a Slavic language (well, maybe a few days of Russian)…but I have a suggestion. Figure out some things you want to be able to say:
My name is…
I come from…
My profession is…
i.e. Things about yourself that you would say if someone was asking about you. Hobbies, family, etc that would tell them about you. Also figure out the questions people might ask you (i.e. the question forms to all the things you might tell them about).
Figure out other questions you might ask them…asking about them, our tourist phrases as someone mentioned below.
You’re not going to get everything memorized in 3 months, but if you focus on these useful phrases and words then I think it will be more helpful than a lot of things you might be reading. Essentially you are creating your own phrasebook that is oriented to your needs. For all of these phrases you’ve created, use Deepl or google translate to get the Ukranian translation and start reading and memorizing these phrases. And try to use them (i.e. look through the English form and try to come up with the Ukranian sentence).
You can create Language Islands beyond the everyday phrases on certain topics. Hobbies, politics, or whatever you may want to try and talk about potentially (or that someone might ask you). Since you have only 3 months you’ll want to focus on the most useful and likely topics. You can use ChatGPT to come up with some vocabulary and useful phrases for these various topics. Even if you don’t memorize much of it to be able to speak, reading and listening to these through an imported LingQ lesson may allow you to catch on to the words and phrases you see and hear. Since you will be targetting what may be most useful, hopefully that would get you in a better place in this short timespan.
Also create some audio for these phrases if you can. If you put the phrases in LingQ, you can use the tts that LingQ has or you can find something better as needed, either paid or free.
Sounds to me like you are making fantastic progress! And quickly. I took Russian in college so I am familiar with the overhead of learning Cyrillic and the complex verb forms.
For close to three years I’ve been self-learning French mostly with LingQ. For me that’s about 4000 hours of reading/listening and 2.5 million words read. I noticed that my speed and comfort really started picking up around 2 million words.
Linguist Tony Marsh has a YouTube channel with a similar approach to learning to converse quickly, and tips for how to set up your initial list of phrases.
