Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language 2025
Twenty-one years of speaking it, and the last of these notes I expect to write about learning rather than about using.
A greeting on the Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language.
Twenty-one years. I finished an MBA in this language this year, which is a reasonable place to stop describing myself as someone learning it.
What remains is an accent that will not go, and a permanent gap in the vocabulary of things I never had to discuss — the names of wild flowers, most of what happens in a kitchen, the exact word for a feeling. Nobody reaches the end of a language they started at twenty.
I have written about the commercial value of it, which is real, and about respect, which is also real. What I would add now is simpler. It is a good language. The literature is worth the effort on its own terms, and I would say that if it were of no use to me whatsoever.
To everyone marking the day.
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