Today I had an epiphany about my process of trying to acquire Ukrainian with no former experience of another Slavic language.

My biggest problem with the Ukrainian, compared to the French, is the lack of a guided grounding of comprehensible input for complete beginners. Alice Ayel, who’s the best language teacher I have yet to come across, has an excellent “one-stop shop” for French comprehensible input. It’s thorough, engaging, entertaining, and effective (as long as I put the time in). If such a thing for Ukrainian exists, I have yet to find it.

So I’ve so far been trying to cobble together my own comprehensible input. While there’s plenty of Ukrainian input available on the web, I’ve said before that I struggle to find input that’s appropriate for my level and that I can focus on for more than a few minutes at a time.

However this morning it occurred to me that Russian, which is very similar to Ukrainian—to the point that my mother, who’s studied Russian but never studied Ukrainian, can understand the latter—is much more popular among language learners, and as such, there’s more chance of finding something along those lines. Given the comparative similarity between the languages, a basic knowledge of Russian would make Ukrainian input a lot more comprehensible for me.

Lo and behold, I found Comprehensive Russian on Youtube. I’ve watched my way through about a third of the introductory playlist, and I’m following pretty well. (Even recognised a number of words from the tiny amount of Ukrainian I’ve already picked up!) Russian was also on my language bucket list, though Ukrainian is still my priority. For now, I just want to acquire enough of it to make Ukrainian input more comprehensible to me.

This is certainly a lesson I will apply to later languages. If a targeted comprehensible input resource such as the ones I’ve mentioned above is not available, I’ll find one for a closely related language and start there. Fortunately in most cases, the related languages on my bucket list are ordered with the most popular one first anyway.