Start For Free!!!
Or
Begin with inactive learning
If you’ve just decided to learn a foreign language there are some very simple and free activities with which you can start and make your further learning much more effective.
My own learning a
nd teaching experience proves those methods to be very useful.
I call it passive learning and I’m sure it should be done before you start active learning.
What do I have to do?
You just have to listen to or watch the Ukrainian language! Don’t be afraid or confused, you don’t have to understand anything! Just listen or/and watch and your brain will do everything by itself. In the beginning this may make you feel uncomfortable or bored, that’s OK, all the people feel this way, don’t stop. To get results from your passive learning and make it useful, you have to do the listening and/or watching for minimum 1 month, 30 minutes every day. It’s very easy because you can do your listening anytime and anywhere: going to/from work, during your lunch, cooking or cleaning at home, doing your sport exercises, before going to sleep etc.
How it works?
With these simple exercises you will automatically:
• Train your ears to hear and recognize the sounds and words of Ukrainian
• Get a great amount of Ukrainian words into your inactive vocabulary (which will shift to your active vocabulary easily during further learning)
• Teach your speech organs to pronounce foreign sounds
• Prepare your brain for the quickest and the most effective learning
What can be used?
I’ve made this list especially for you:)! I choose each of them carefully so all the links and material are popular, well-known, of a good quality and simple enough.
Pay more attention to the listening, on this stage of learning it’s more important!
Radio stations (online):
(be careful – sound can be automatically very loud!)
music, information, news:
Songs:
Audio books:
Movies and programmes:
(online)
I remind you: you don’t have to understand or translate anything! Just relax and
Enjoy!!!!:)
Ukrainian is not very easy, but if you follow recomended steps you’ll certainly get good results!
Here I present you an approximate program of learning Ukrainian:
1. Inactive learning (you can find the discription in the article “Start for free”
2. Reading
3. Writing
4. Initial words & phrases from first easy topics
5. Elementary grammar + new words + practice*
6. Basic grammar + new words + practice*
7. New words from different topics + practice*
*Practice means reading, writing and speaking.
GOOD LUCK!
All languages in the world are beautiful, some are similar and some are different but all of them have the definite structure. Most languages have the structure which looks like a tree: roots, trunk and branches, leaves and fruits…
So, now you can see that you can’t use a language without its main, basic components. The words must be arranged on the grammar basis and the grammar can be expressed only by means of the words, all the rest is additional and can be learnt afterwards (in the process of speaking).
Well, try to grow your own tree of Ukrainian!
Why The Grammar Is Important
There are a lot of different modern (very promising) methods to learn a foreign language. Many of them attract people telling you don’t have to learn the grammar or rules, or words or anything at all! Some of them propose some new psychological (magic ) ways in which you do almost nothing and have good results! As a teacher and a psychologist I can assure you: any way of learning is good and useful, but in fact almost all of them aren’t quite effective. Here is the truth: to know something you have to learn it and work at it. Most of modern methods claim to give you a possibility to learn a language in an easy way as if you were a child, simply absorbing information from some audio or something like that… But you have to face it, in 95% it’s not
going to work! Because:
-
We are adults and, unfortunately, we don’t have the same learning abilities and principles as we used to have when we were children. Our brain isn’t working like that now.
-
You don’t have a constant foreign language environment.
Of course, you can use such materials as additional ones, anyway to get the best result the learning must be complex. But the main way to be able to use a foreign language is to know (not by heart, just as a fact) and understand basic grammar principles. Actually, it’s not so difficult as many people think 
Remember – Grammar is the basis of any language, it’s structure. You don’t have to know it perfectly-perfectly, but you have to be familiar with it, to be able to build your speech and to arrange your knowledge.
