Yuri Shevchuk’s New Book Depicts Ukraine as “a Happy, Modern, Polyglot and Cosmopolitan Culture”

Yuri Shevchuk started a tour to support Beginner’s Ukrainian - his new textbook for those studying Ukrainian as a foreign language, and spoke to Roman Tashleetsky in Toronto about this much anticipated publication.

Roman Tashleetsky: Tell us about your textbook. What are its peculiarities?

Yuri Shevchuk: The book I’m speaking about is the result of 20 years experience teaching at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer School, then teaching continuously at Columbia University since 2004.  This book for the first time has a companion website - 95 percent of all material in the book is recorded as audio files and open to the world from the Internet. You don’t need a password; one click and you have it all downloaded from the website.

The book is constructed in such a way that anybody who doesn’t have access to a language instructor can use it well. It is interactive, meaning that almost every exercise in the book is formatted so that there is an interlocutor. The exercises are built along lines of cue and answer, and the cues are very simple. For example, Київ – Степан – that’s the cue, and the model will say Степан живе у Києві. After the pause, the speaker of the language is recorded and you can verify your decision against the speaker. So there is a mechanism of self-correction imbedded into the book. In addition, there is a second self-correction mechanism: all exercises without exception have keys, which are also downloadable from the website, so you can correct yourself also against the written key.

Another thing new to this book is that from the very first page you learn how to speak. Grammar is seen here only as a vehicle to conversation. That’s why every grammatical subject starts with what you can say knowing a particular form. In that way, you know why you’re learning the grammar.

R.T.: Your textbook contains an impressive dictionary; could you tell us about it?

Y.S.: This dictionary is not a wordlist; it’s called a learner’s dictionary of the language. Something so far not published in Ukrainian. This dictionary is meant not only to give a description of the meaning of words; it also describes their phonetic and morphological structure. Ukrainian is notoriously difficult for learners because of all kinds of mutations Ukrainian words can undergo: стіл-столи. In the dictionary, everything is taken care of: книга-книзі, муха-мусі. It also gives you information on how to actually insert a particular word in speech, how to construct a sentence, what preposition a verb requires, what case a particular preposition requires, and how an adjective agrees with a noun.

R.T.: I have noticed that each page of the textbook is abundant with illustrations…

Y.S.: This book is richly illustrated. A language textbook should be engaging, captivating visually. There was no such pleasure available to Ukrainian language students. I started writing to everyone I knew and then, when I realized that I did not have enough pictures, I wrote to people whom I didn’t know to donate me a picture for a “thank you”. Some two dozen strangers from all over Ukraine responded saying that this is a fantastic project and they wanted to be part of it, because it’s high time for the Ukrainian language to become accessible to anybody in the world. The pictures in the book, therefore, are a kind of sociological self-portrait of Ukraine.

I wanted to step away from a colonial stereotype of “Ukrainianness” and create the impression of a happy, modern, polyglot and cosmopolitan culture which is today’s Ukraine, a country that has faces that look Slavic, Tatar, Jewish, or dozens of nationalities which inhabit Ukraine. They all have one important thing in common: they speak Ukrainian – the State Language - and they are proud of it.

R.T.: The book was published in August 2011, so you’ve been using it for a few months. Did the students’ performance improve?

Y.S.: Yes, the published book has been used for over three months, but the materials of the book were very intensively tested with my students beforehand and changed with input from the students. Ideally, the book is meant to be covered in two semesters, but depending on the student and instructor, they can decide what tempo is the most comfortable for them. So it can be covered in two or three semesters. It can also be used as a skeleton with your own added material to learn a bit deeper. I know from my students, now that the book is out, that there’s a huge difference.

R.T.: What would one be able to do after completing the book (for example, in reading a newspaper)?

Y.S.: You’ll solidly be at the mid-intermediate or even low-advanced level in terms of writing, reading, conversing, and understanding.  The only stumbling block reading the newspaper would probably be when you encounter specialized vocabulary (like political vocabulary – it’s not here), and syntactic structures typical of newspaper style writing. There is no passive voice in this book, it’s too early. But you can build on it. If you learn everything in this book, you’ll be well taken care of, and very well equipped to go further, as from a springboard.

R.T.: Where can one buy your book?

Y.S.: For the first time, a Ukrainian language textbook is published not by an academic publishing house, but by a commercial one. That has not compromised the quality of the book, but it did something that no other Ukrainian textbook can boast: Beginner’s Ukrainian is at least twice or three times less expensive than any of its Ukrainian counterparts. This book has some 430 pages and costs $35 (discounted on Amazon and Barnes and Noble). That way, it’s doubly accessible to people who would like to buy it. So, if you have friends who wanted to learn Ukrainian, but were afraid to start – this is a great present.

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Yuri Shevchuk