Customer Reviews

Beginner's Ukrainian: Iak Sia Maiesh (Beginner's Guides (New York, N.Y.))

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This book is one of the better beginner Ukrainian books. Theone that closely resembles it is Assya Humesky's "ModernUkrainian" which I wasn't as pleased with. I prefer this book because it has easy to read charts (such as verb conjugation etc), which help in studying and for quick reference. Humesky's book doesn't really have the charts, just the info layed out. If I would have had this book, I feel I would have done much better in my Ukrainian class. Either way, Poulard's "Beginning Ukrainian" makes a great companian/supplement for those use "Modern Ukrainian" as the standard text for the class. This book is a real bargain. If you have a Ukrainian class, spend the money, it will be well worth it in the long run. END

If it weren't for the fact that I already speak fluent Russian, this book would not have been very helpful to me. If you're learning Ukrainian from scratch, this book can give you the basics, but it might also confuse you. The grammar was not explained as clearly as it could have been, and I think I understood it only because of my Russian. I also can't believe that there are no accent marks for the Ukrainian words. That has been my biggest frustration, because when I try out my Ukrainian on some Ukrainian friends, I have no clue if I'm pronouncing the words correctly, and sometimes the way I say things sounds funny to them. However, this book can give you a good start if you already have experience with a slavic language. Just make sure you get a dictionary so that you'll know where the accent marks are. But if you're a beginner, you might want to look for a better book.

I purchased this book to gain a basic reading knowlege of Ukrainian and was extemely disappointed. Verb conjugations and noun declensions are usefully laid out in charts, but Poulard's book lacks basic features which are necessary in any intoductory Ukrainian language text.

To start, it does not adequately explain how the verb "buty"/"to be" functions in the Ukrainian language. When it does provide a conjugation of the verb, it fails to explain that the verb, when conjugated, has a future meaning--i.e., "will be." Generally, the verb is not conjugated but rather implied in the present tense in Ukrainian. I knew there was a problem with how Poulard explained things (or rather, failed to explain things) only because I had studied Russian for several years and thus was already some basic features of Slavic linguistics. A beginning student would likely become confused by Poulard's presentation.

Another pervasive problem is the lack of accents throughout. Like Russian, Ukrainian has a complicated stress system--there is simply no way for a beginning student to figure out the proper stress for a given word without memorizing it, since stress can even shift within the declension or conjugation of a given noun or verb. Furthermore, the meaning of certain words changes altogether with a different stress. Thus, it is absolutely crucial that any introductory Ukrainian book address the problem of stress and provide accents throughout.

Unfortunately, serious language textbooks tend to be expensive because of the research, review process and specialized typesetting involved. Books like Poulard's may be more affordable, but in the long term they can actually hinder progress in language acquisition. Whether you're studying on your own or purchasing this for a class, I recommend hunting down a text by a more qualified language teaching specialist.

This book did not fulfill my expectations. Here are a couple of problems with it:

1. As some others have pointed out, stress is never marked in this book. In East Slavic languages such as Russian and Ukrainian, stress is both somewhat unpredictable, and also movable - meaning that the stress can move to different syllables for a given word, depending upon case and number. The word "sea" ("more"), for instance, is stressed on the first syllable in the nominative singular, but on the ending for the plural. Beginning texts for these languages should always show stress in vocabulary lists and exercises. Even beginning texts for Russian children show the stress. That this one does not is a serious omission, and will cause problems for the beginning student.

2. At first I thought that the glossary at the back did not contain all of the words from the text, but when I got about halfway through the book, I found that there is a glossary in the middle of the book as well. Not bad, I guess, just weird....

3. The author really takes up a lot of space with the conjugation and declension tables. They are repeated in their entirety for all preceding lessons, as well as new grammatical developments for the current lesson. It really felt like padding the text to me. I think those kinds of tables are essential, but they should be printed at the beginning or the end of the book, in their entirety. Those conjugations or declensions (e.g. genitive case) which are relevant for a particular lesson, or course, should be printed in that lesson.

4. The dialogues are just silly. Here's a paraphrase of one of them: "Oksana, why are you crying?" "I went to the US Embassy, and they wouldn't give me a visa...they are afraid that I will not return to my homeland." "Those stupid bureaucrats! America is no longer the land of the free if they allow such behavior! Here's what you do: you go there every day and bother them, and meanwhile I will contact my congressman and senators...."

5. The dialogues are not really useful for a wide variety of situations. Someone who wants to learn another language has perhaps one of several motivations: either to travel and be able to converse, or to be able to begin to read of the history, literature, etc. of the people speaking the target language. This book seems to attempt to achieve all things for all people, and is unable to succeed in any of them. The dialogues, as I said, are silly, and don't really give much practice unless the language learner is planning to spend a lot of time in church, or in complaining about how the Soviet regime ruined the Ukraine. On the last point, incidentally, Ukrainians, although I know better from experience, come across in this book as whiny, grievance-mongering, and self-absorbed.

6. The vocabulary is not accurate. When I had a Ukrainian friend help me with marking stress, there were numerous instances where he corrected the vocabulary - he said those were not the words they used. Of course, it's possible that this is just a difference in dialect, maybe it is my friend who is not using "standard" Ukrainian, but it was just one more reason to doubt the value of what of I was learning.

There seem to be some good books on Ukrainian on Amazon, both those for the serious student and for the person wanting to be able to converse while traveling in the Ukraine. Look into those, and avoid this one. I have studied Russian, and I was looking for a Ukrainian book that would be able to give me the fundamentals of grammar and orthograghy, that would allow me to see words with the same root differ in form between Russian and Ukrainian, and a little more (meaning, a solid vocabulary). This book achieved the first two, and failed in the last. Since I probably could have found the first two for free on the internet, I feel I wasted my money.

Start with the basic concept that the book is titled in the incorrect language, assume then that you will not likely learn Ukrainian. I would have rated it zero stars, however that was not an option.