The English Language Conquest of the World

As the electronic, cultural, and economic interconnectedness of the world increases, more and more languages of regional importance are losing ground against English, which is now the indisputable global leader. There are very few contenders left that can be considered languages of international communication: Spanish (Latin America), French (France, Quebec, and parts of Africa), Arabic (however, the various dialects of Arabic are quite different, making communication difficult), Chinese (east Asia; some competition between Mandarin and Cantonese), and Russian (former USSR). All of these languages are losing ground to English as their respective regions of dominance increasingly interact with others. Even Chinese will likely not obtain anything near the status of English, as its citizens are learning English at a much faster rate than the rest of the world is learning Chinese. With its outmoded non-phonetic script and challenging tonality, the barriers to learning Chinese are high, whereas English is more accessible to beginners.

The most recent "casualty" in this competition of international languages is Russian, which used to be the primary language of international communication across much of Eurasia. Within as little as 10 or 20 years, its importance could fall to the level of, say, German — a language studied by people outside of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland primarily as a hobby rather than an economic necessity.

While national languages have grown modestly in importance as a result of measures to sideline Russian in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Transcaucasia region, the primary — and perhaps surprising — beneficiary has actually been English. English is now the language children are learning in school instead of Russian, it is a popular language for all sorts of public events, and — as opposed to Russian — is hardly ever perceived as a threat by nationalists. One can hold nearly any public event in Kiev in English without hearing complaints from Ukrainian "patriots," while similar events in Russian often draw public disapproval. It is prestigious and fashionable to give businesses and events English names and practically taboo to give them Russian ones except for the most stalwart historically Russian-speaking regions. Any event or entity that has any sort of international orientation is now automatically written in English. It is as much a gesture to increase the perceived importance of the event or entity among locals as a pragmatic measure to ensure that any influential international guests do not experience the slightest linguistic discomfort. The discomfort of non-English speaking visitors/clients is typically not taken into consideration.

In places where it used to be standard practice to duplicate street signs and metro information in Russian, this is now being done in English, and the Russian signs are gone. Across much of the former Soviet periphery, the generation under 20-25 years of age is growing up with better English skills than Russian. Even in countries that use Cyrillic or national alphabets (Armenia, Georgia), people usually send text messages in Latin characters and often post things on Facebook in their respective languages using Latin characters, or simply write in English. Increasingly, younger travelers from former Soviet states are speaking English rather than Russian with locals in other former Soviet states — for instance, Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians or Estonian-speaking Estonians who visit Georgia. In 10 years or so, English will probably have replaced Russian as the dominant regional language in the Transcaucasus and Baltic states. In other words, Azerbaijanis in Georgia or Lithuanians in Latvia will use English to get around and do business more than Russian. This is where current trends are pointing.

Within countries as well, English is gaining cultural influence faster than most national languages can keep up. This is particularly true in smaller or poorer countries which don't have large and powerful economic and cultural institutions churning out lots of interesting products in the national language. So, for instance, rather than using or creating domestic websites or software, locals use international ones whose default language is English. Instead of getting their own academics to write textbooks for students in the local language (which may require inventing new terminology), many universities make use of foreign textbooks and learning aids, which are usually in English. Much other literature is translated from other languages, usually English. Instead of listening to their own bands, youth listen to "international" music, which means more English. They look up names and information in English online because there is so much more information available. There aren't enough translators, cultural adapters, writers, musicians, home-grown academics and scientists, etc. to meet demand.

The smaller the country, the greater the proportion of materials from English-language sources present in the infosphere. Of former Soviet states, only Russia appears to be populous and dominant enough economically, culturally, and academically to produce enough of its own information products in most spheres. For instance, there are Russian social networks that compete regionally with Facebook (Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki) and Russian-made search engines that compete regionally with Google and are even trying to go international (Yandex). Russia also has, by far, the best-funded science and research institutions (science is all but dead in many post-Soviet states) and the greatest software and literary output of the post-Soviet states. Even in Russia, though, cumulative adoption of English-language culture and information products within Russia is clearly greater than adoption of Russian-language culture and products outside of native Russian speaking regions of Eurasia.

As English comes closer to becoming the single global lingua franca and more and more products are produced in English relative to other languages, individual countries progressively lose their cultural self-containedness and self-sufficiency. The larger and more powerful the country, the longer it can "hold out" against the wave of externally produced English-language culture and information. In general, the smaller a country, the faster and more thoroughly it "internationalizes." In Georgia, for instance, academia and technology are too weak and too poorly funded and staffed to keep up — linguistically — with scientific and technical progress. There are now many things that can't be properly discussed in Georgian because the vocabulary just isn't there. Hence, Georgians are particularly receptive to foreign language penetration — before Russian, now English — and are more outward looking than Russians or even Ukrainians. There was even a serious initiative to make English the second official language despite an almost complete absence of native English speaking Georgian citizens. Throughout the process of foreign linguistic assimilation Georgian has remained the language of traditional culture and values: the dinner table, relationships, music and poetry, rural life, etc.

Even in larger countries with plenty of economic clout, such as Germany, Japan, or Russia, the relative importance of national languages is still eroding as people increasingly look outside their home countries for information and cultural and intellectual products. This process of "opening up to the world" is commonly viewed in a positive light; we have all heard the platitudes that "there is so much we can learn from each other" and "cultural exchange enriches everyone involved." However, contrary to popular belief, cultural exchange is more often one-sided than not, and often extremely so. The incentives for people from the less-dominant culture to learn from and absorb the more-dominant one are greater than vice versa. Imagine a group of equal numbers of American and Ukrainian youth who spend a year together at some isolated camp. Who will gain more from the experience? Will the Americans end up speaking Ukrainian or will the Ukrainians end up speaking English? Will the experience prove more valuable for the Americans in their future careers or for the Ukrainians? Anyone who's been to Ukraine knows that Ukrainians are more susceptible to English-language cultural influence than Americans are to Ukrainian culture. How many non-Ukrainians have been tangibly "enriched" by Ukrainian culture compared to Ukrainians who have been enriched by international (i.e. English-language) culture? Whichever area we look at, we see that far more Ukrainians are being drawn into the predominantly English-language international cultural realm than vice versa. Cultural exchange is really not two-directional, and the people who promote it are usually spokesmen for the dominant culture who have the privilege of experiencing a "taste" of different cultures for "personal enrichment," while people in the less dominant culture are subject to a total onslaught of new information, values, practices, and cultural products coming from the developed West, along with the necessity of learning English to increase their material opportunities in life.

This same pattern of unequal cultural "exchange" holds true even in more powerful countries such as Germany, Japan, and Russia, mentioned above. Consider how so many people in creative professions adopt the use of English to "reach a global audience," and how few of their counterparts in other countries adopt the other language to reach audiences in that country. For instance, there are far more German bands that sing in English than bands from non-German speaking countries that sing in German. In nearly every area of life there are economic and social benefits attached to the use of English and consumption of English-language cultural and information products. Movement in the opposite direction — from a dominant culture to a less dominant one — in contrast, only confers individual benefits or niche economic benefits. Expats from more dominant cultures who settle in less dominant ones tend to be viewed with an incredulity that is proportional to the difference in the level of dominance of the two cultures aggregated with the difference in per-capita GDP. For instance, an American who has settled in Germany might be a bit of an oddity, one who starts a business in Kiev or even Moscow raises many eyebrows, but one who moves to a village in Siberia merits a detailed, sentimental report on national television. In contrast, immigrants from Ethiopia, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, or Japan who speak fluent English barely arouse curiosity in the U.S. Few people question their motivation for immigrating or display much interest in their mother culture and tongue.

The future

It is safe to assume this powerful global anglification trend will remain in place as long as there is a high degree of global economic and cultural interconnectedness and of international travel. Anything that reduces interconnectedness — such as major wars and massive economic downturns — could reverse this trend temporarily (or, in theory, permanently if the upheaval is global in scale). The last bastions of non-English regional usage will probably by China and Latin America, which have large populations already speaking, more or less, a single common language and are geographically removed from the dominant West. It appears no longer crucial to the anglification trend that the U.S. (or U.K., pre-WWI) is the world's most powerful economy. Enough people now speak and use English outside native English-speaking countries that English is perceived more as the language of international communication than as the language of Americans, Brits, Canadians, Aussies, and Kiwis.

If interconnectedness continues to increase and English achieves the status of a universal language of international communication, a number of interesting consequences are conceivable. First, interest in learning foreign languages other than English may drop because there is no longer any necessity, and all other competing regional languages have been displaced. Second, English may gradually take over more and more functions within individual countries, eventually reducing local languages to a kind of everyday vernacular. First this will be done in politics, because it will save costs in paperwork and translation. The academic community will also find it more efficient to just publish most things in English for the sake of information interchange with colleagues worldwide. Public events involving participants from different countries will also be easier to organize and conduct in English. English could eventually become the language of public life and institutions within countries as well, which would elevate it to the status of Latin — a language that originated in west-central Italy, became the public language of western civilization, and remained the language of scholarship and administration across Europe for well over a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Adapting to a New Country: Part 2 — Language

(This is a continuation of the previous post)

In the past I have recommended that people learn as much of the language before their arrival as possible. I would like to revise that. If you can set up language lessons immediately after arrival, then it is probably a better use of your time and energy to just come a few days or weeks earlier and fill that extra time with language study with a tutor, rather than trying (usually unsuccessfully) to find time for independent study while you are busy preparing for your trip. Learning in advance takes more self-discipline than learning on location, and is typically less effective.

My goal for learning Ukrainian or Russian would be very concrete. You need to get over the initial learning hump as quickly as possible so that your knowledge of the language can carry you from there without too much additional effort. Once you are already speaking in the language and understand a large amount of what is being said, moving onward from there is much easier and doesn't require a lot of willpower and study. All that is needed is simply to have people to talk to in the language for a minimum of half an hour to an hour a day and to have a good dictionary (more on this below).

It can take 2 months or less to reach this threshold of somewhere between 1000 and 2000 words (I'd say roughly 1600), or it can take years or even forever if the right conditions or willpower are lacking. If your approach is effective (more on this below), you can assimilate these 1600 or so most useful and oft-repeated words — which I call the "communicative core" of a language — with 150-200 hours of work, which can be compressed into as little as 1.5-3 months. If the process is too drawn out and you keep getting distracted, you may end up taking much longer to get there in terms of hours of effort invested.

If at all possible, I would try to find an independent Russian/Ukrainian tutor in advance or sign up for beginning group classes with a reputable school of Russian/Ukrainian. I would also get some kind of beginning-to-intermediate audiocourse and an electronic dictionary for personal use to complement classwork (more on this below). I would arrange for classes on a near-daily basis. If you're meeting fewer than 3 times a week, it will be easy to lose momentum between lessons.

The order in which you learn things is very important. It is important to focus on what is relevant to your life right now unless you are a bookworm who gets carried away learning the structural nuances of a language. Here is the order I would attack Ukrainian or Russian.

1. The most basic phrases (days 1-2). Things like "hello," "thank you," "please," "excuse me," "do you speak English?", "I don't speak Russian/Ukrainian," "I don't understand," "my name is…", etc., plus very basic grammar associated with these phrases — i.e. conjugating the verbs "to speak" and "to understand," pronouns, and a brief introduction to the most basic grammar principles of Russian/Ukrainian.

2. Cyrillic alphabet + pronunciation (days 2-3). Alphabet and pronunciation go together. Learn all the letters and their best approximate pronunciation. Learn how to write and pronounce your own name. Practice reading some of the signs you'll see all over town ("ресторан," "гастроном," "банк," etc.) and learn what they mean. From here on you can practice reading signs around town and look up or ask your teacher what they mean. Practice repeating words slowly after your teacher to try to grasp the proper pronunciation. Your teacher needs to be sufficiently patient and to be able to explain and demonstrate some of the difficult sounds now and in the future as necessary. It is important to introduce good pronunciation habits from the outset because it will make speaking easier after an initial "break-in" period. Note: all words learned should have accent marks above accented syllables, and nouns should be noted as masculine, feminine, or neuter.

3. An additional complication for Ukraine is that in many mostly Russian-speaking cities almost all the signs are in Ukrainian. This will cost you a bit of time early on, but if you're learning Russian you'll need to learn the Russian equivalents of the words on the signs you're seeing around town (weeks 1-2). Usually the words are very similar, so it shouldn't be terribly difficult. At some point later on (weeks 5-8?) you will also need to learn the fairly short list of differences in pronunciation of Cyrillic letters in Ukrainian vs. Russian, and if you are in a city where much Ukrainian is spoken (Kiev), near the end of the course (weeks 7-8?) it will be very useful to be introduced to the most basic Ukrainian vocabulary (same stuff you learned in the first couple days of Russian classes).

4. Basic vocabulary for specific everyday needs. About 150-200 words at first (weeks 1-2), growing to 2 or 3 times that number by the time you've assimilated the full "communicative core" of 1600 or so words, including names of things you need to buy (groceries, milk, water, beer, banana, ticket, phone card, etc.) or often need to refer to (mobile phone, computer, Internet, wi-fi, apartment, city center, metro, train station, marshrutka, bus stop, office, school, organization, etc.), basic professions and roles (teacher, student, programmer, volunteer, father, mother, children, etc. depending on your activities), countries, nationalities, and languages (America, English, German, Ukrainian, Ukraine, Kiev, France, French, Russia, etc. depending on where you're from), and the "connective vocabulary" necessary to use them ("I am a ___," "I speak ___," "I am from ___," "Do you have ___," "where is ___?", etc., to go, to buy, to want, to be able, to need, etc.), as well as just enough grammar to understand why you say these things the way you do in Russian/Ukrainian. All this new vocabulary should be written in Cyrillic. This will slow things down compared to using transliteration, but it will be much more effective in the long run because you will learn to read, write, and pronounce better in the process.

5. Remaining basic general vocabulary for general communication (1000+ words). The most basic all-purpose vocabulary (my, your, me, him, her, it, that, who, what, when, where, why, because, here, there, today, now, again, at, in, on, etc., as well as numbers) should be introduced in weeks 1-2 with subsequent general vocabulary building upon previous words in order of usage and importance. For instance, "to forget" is appropriate for weeks 5-6 of an 8-week course designed to teach you the communicative core, but not for weeks 1-2. Months, days of the week, and telling time are appropriate for weeks 3-4, but talking about years ("in 1998," etc.) is for weeks 5-8. Grammar principles should be introduced as needed to create and explain dialogues appropriate to your level and current needs. Under no circumstances should your course commence with charts of endings and conjugations. You risk becoming discouraged and delaying your attainment of the communicative threshold by months or years. Introduced bit by bit in the context of things you have heard Ukrainians say or things you need to say yourself, Ukrainian or Russian grammar will be much more accessible and easy to grasp. Vocabulary and grammar that is timely is assimilated much better than untimely vocabulary and grammar. Remember that the connections between words are just as important as the words themselves; if you just know words and no constructions, then you will not be able to guess how to say things as simple as, "I need more time" or "I have a son." General vocabulary should be introduced along with common constructions for using it.

6. Along the way from the beginning to the end, it is necessary to have considerable amounts of unstructured exposure to the language outside of class. This is necessary so that your audial memory can engage in the language learning process by telling you things like "hey, I've heard that word before" and "what does «давай!» mean?" as well as gaining an intuitive feeling for how the language is spoken. Much of this can be achieved by walking around town and going about your daily activities (going to the store, restaurants, cafes, work, parties, people's houses, etc.), but the process can be sped up if you also spend time listening to special dialogues designed for the beginner or intermediate level. These dialogues will be spoken more clearly and slowly and will contain more of the words you have learned or will learn soon in class, so you will be able to get more out of them more quickly. I find it best when the dialogues are exclusively in the foreign language. If they are a complement to studies with a teacher or tutor, then an accompanying textbook is not necessary. If you find you are curious about grammar "ahead of schedule," then look for a grammar textbook to peruse on your own. But don't overdo it and get stressed out by all the things you don't understand. Just use it to satisfy your curiosity and get a second explanation of things in addition to what your teacher has told you, nothing more. Grammar study should assist speaking and comprehension, not vice versa.

7. You will also need a good dictionary — paper or electronic — to be able to look up words on your own. But you shouldn't get too carried away with this process. If you start writing down lots of words that you have not yet heard spoken (i.e. your audial memory is not yet engaged), chances are you will not be able to incorporate them into your active vocabulary until you actually start hearing them spoken around you. Therefore, focus on words you have heard or keep seeing around you, or on words you need right now to be able to say something important ("eggs," "the Internet doesn't work," "I have a cold," etc.). Ideally, the dictionary needs to show accent marks, any shifting accents, case requirements (e.g. "сказáть что кому, о чём" or "через что, кого"), and word morphology: declensions (changing endings) for nouns, conjugations and aspect (perfective or imperfective) for verbs. This way you will be able to obtain answers to most questions you will have about words and their proper usage. These days good electronic dictionaries for portable electronic devices make this easier than ever. For instance, the excellent and voluminous Oxford English-Russian dictionary is now available as an application for the iPhone/iPod/iPad. There is also a decent "Slovoed" dictionary app including other major European languages as well.

If you follow these recommendations, making minor adjustments for your individual needs and learning style, I can guarantee that you will get over that initial learning hump within a few months, making your life in Ukraine that much easier and more multidimensional.

UPDATE 2016:

I have finally decided to teach others my method for learning and mastering foreign languages at www.FrictionlessMastery.com. Take a look and download or order my book and/or instruction manual. My ideas are a lot clearer and more evolved than what I've written here. 

Learn Russian/Ukrainian Now or Forever Hold Your Peace

With each passing year more and more Ukrainians are becoming conversational in English. Among ambitious young Ukrainians ages 18 to 30, an intermediate level of English is pretty much a given. Sure, people complain about not getting enough practice and we all know that language instruction in Ukrainian schools and colleges leaves much to be desired, but still... процесс пошел (things have started rolling). One thing that is helping bring this change is access to online courses and programs that allow students to communicate with instructors in other countries.

Ukraine is in the middle of an English language boom, and one often gets the sense that there is a frenzied race to learn English for career advancement and to grow closer to the "real" Europe, make new friends, date foreigners, emigrate, etc.

While this may be good news for the country's economy, it's often bad news for Amero-European expats who wish to stay in Ukraine for a longer period of time, perfect their language skills, and integrate into the culture — in short, to feel at home.

Very often, the people expats typically would be most interested in making friends with happen to be those who are most involved in the English language craze: young, well-educated, upwardly mobile and cosmopolitan city dwellers. Most of these Ukrainians have a goal of improving their English and tend to see foreigners through this lens.

To get people to speak a foreign language with you, you generally have to speak their language better than they speak yours. As Ukrainians' average English level rises, the bar for expats' Russian and Ukrainian rises along with it, and it becomes more difficult to get language practice. It used to be that you could practice Russian/Ukrainian with anybody. Now, you're pretty much left with schoolchildren, the less educated, and the elderly (okay, maybe more like those over 45).

Fat chance making Russian or Ukrainian speaking friends among the "young and ambitious" group. You'll literally have to demoralize them into speaking their language with you with your superior Russian or Ukrainian skills. And even then many will hope that some day their English will be good enough to turn the tables in their own favor. But how is an expat to reach that level in the first place if the only people to practice with are uneducated store workers, ticket ladies, pensioners, and language teachers whose services cost 10-20 Euros an hour?

To extrapolate where this trend is going, try integrating into the local culture in the Netherlands or Scandinavia. You might as well forget about it. You're in luck if you're from Latin America, Africa, or Asia: you can always claim that you don't know English. If you're white, that will be pretty difficult.

Ukraine will obviously take many years to reach this point, but given Ukrainians' degree of personal ambition and disillusionment with their own country, it could be as little as 10 years down the road. The time to learn Ukrainian and/or Russian is now, before it's too late! Ukraine is fast becoming a place where you have to pay (or trick) people into speaking Russian or Ukrainian with you.

UPDATE 2016:

I have finally decided to teach others my method for learning and mastering foreign languages at www.FrictionlessMastery.com. Take a look and download or order my book and/or instruction manual. 

Teach Yourself Russian / Ukrainian

Let's say you've planned a trip to Ukraine (or anywhere else, for that matter) and are leaving in 3 months' time. You have 1 hour a day to devote to learning a foreign language (2 if you're particularly dedicated). What do you do?

Here's what I do. First, one needs to recognize that to the following must all be acquired if you want to gain and retain for the long run a truly useful set of language skills:

• reading skills: being able to read signs, basic instructions, etc.
• listening comprehension: understanding much of what natives say when talking at normal speed
• speaking skills, including decent pronunciation (even if you speak very slowly)
• familiarity with all the basic grammar concepts

A basic, sustainable vocabulary allowing one to convey and understand most information consists of roughly 1500 words (see sample core vocabulary list for Russian). I believe it is possible to become familiar with 1500 words, how they sound, and how they are used, in 90 days while spending 1-2 hours a day. That's just 17 words a day. Here's how.

Most importantly, you'll need a high-quality language course that includes the following:

• lessons incorporating not much less or much more than 1500 words, including the most commonly used and useful words of the language
• explanations of all basic grammar principles of the language that don't go into excessive detail
• at least 1 hour of audio material including complete sentences, preferably conversations and texts, spoken at near-normal speed by natives and including all vocabulary words in the course

My favorite series is the series of basic language courses for self-learners from Langenscheidt. It has all the traits mentioned and is perfectly sufficient for attaining an "advanced beginner" (without real-life speaking practice) or "lower-intermediate" (with speaking practice) level in 3 months before a trip to a foreign country. It's the standard course you want -- not the "30-day" crash course which simply doesn't contain enough vocabulary, repetition, or grammar info to provide a sustainable level of language mastery. The course has 30 lessons and comes with about 2 hours of audio exclusively in the foreign language and consisting of complete sentences and conversations or texts. There is no need to buy a dictionary or other materials along with the course.

Unfortunately, Langenscheidt's Russian course is available only in German! In Ukraine you can find many Langenscheidt course books translated into Russian or Ukrainian -- German, Spanish, French, Polish, and others. I've used a couple of these with great success and recommend them highly.

If you don't speak German, you'll need to find something similar to the Langenscheidt course with all the features I've mentioned. It shouldn't have to cost much more than $30 USD. Surely there must be some similarly structured courses out there.

How to use a language course for self-learners

If you know how to utilize courses like Langenscheidt's to your advantage, there is simply no need to pay for expensive, high-tech, newfangled language learning methodologies (I won't name names). My opinion is that such courses are for people with learning difficulties or for those who simply don't know any better. Sorry if I offended anyone!

When I use a Langenscheidt course, I start by working through the texts of the first several lessons and figuring out what they are saying. (With Russian/Ukrainian there will be the initial difficulty of learning the alphabet first, which will slow you down for a while.) I pay attention to the grammar notes and use them to help figure out the text. I don't try to memorize anything, but sometimes I make lists of conjugations or important word sets -- for instance, "I - my - mine, you - your - yours, he - his - his, she - her - hers, it - its - its, we - our - ours, you - your - yours, they - their - theirs." I basically skip the exercises till a later date when I've built up my familiarity with the sounds and the forms. Some people like exercises and are comfortable doing them from the outset.

Then, I start listening to the audio. It's important to spend at least as much time listening to the audio recordings as you do working with the textbook. Your brain needs time to digest the new sounds and learn to differentiate words from the stream of sounds. I might go through 3 lessons of the textbook, then listen to the audio for the lessons one time through without looking at the book, to see what I am able to recognize from the text. Then I might listen to the recordings a few more times while looking at the text, to see if I can pick up more of it. Finally, I'll listen to the recordings again without looking at the texts. The goal is in the end to be able to listen to all the audio for the course and understand all of it without consulting the textbook. Too often, language learners fail to focus on listening comprehension. But if you don't, you'll never get the pronunciation right and you won't understand it when people use the words that you have supposedly already learned.

The nice thing about listening is that you can do it while doing other things -- driving, jogging, walking, cleaning, etc. You don't have to understand everything for it to be useful. Generally, each time you listen to a recording you'll pick up a bit of new information whether you realize it or not.

It's important to avoid stressing while learning a foreign language (or anything else, for that matter). Stress means that much of your mental energy is being wasted as "heat" instead of being used for a useful purpose. If learning a foreign language is stressing you, there might be something more basic that you don't understand that is preventing you from understanding the new material. For this reason it is useful to study a very simple language such as Esperanto before attacking real foreign languages. Studies show that students who spent a year learning Esperanto before subsequently learning French did a lot better than those who spent the whole time learning just French (see link). Learning Esperanto first familiarized them with the basic structure of languages in general, and after that it was easier to apply what they had learned to a natural and more difficult language.

As an example of avoiding stress, I personally don't like doing exercises -- conjugating verbs, practicing declensions, translating texts, etc. So I just skip them! My focus is on learning how to say the important things I need to say. Exercises are nothing more than a tool to help achieve this, and they don't work for everyone.

Find a native -- if you can

At some point in your language learning, it can be very beneficial to meet with a native speaker to ask if you're saying things correctly and to learn some additional phrases and vocabulary that you expect to need. Language clubs -- if they exist in your city or town -- are a great way to get this added exposure.

Q&A

Feel free to post questions regarding learning Russian and Ukrainian effectively on your own. Also, if anyone knows of do-it-yourself language courses like what I've described here, please post information so that others can find them.

UPDATE 2016:

I have finally decided to teach others my method for learning and mastering foreign languages at www.FrictionlessMastery.com. Take a look and download or order my book and/or instruction manual. My views and methods have are clearer and more evolved than what I wrote here.

Tips for Learning Russian and Ukrainian

As I explained in my previous post, expats from English speaking or western European countries face a particular set of challenges when learning Russian or Ukrainian in Ukraine.

First of all, some observations about learning a foreign language from someone who has studied quite a few.

Language mastery seems to follow a curve like the one below. At first you put in a lot of time and effort just to learn the basics, then you reach a point where you now recognize many words and phrases and begin to have an intuitive feel for how things might be said in the language ("Getting the hang of it").

Now your progress starts to pick up, and not too much time passes before you can begin having simple conversations with natives ("Simple conversations"). At this point your progress accelerates further, because you can actively learn in the process of communication, not just during class or private study.

You now start a period of rapid language acquisition where you pick up commonly used words and phrases that you hear all around you. Eventually, you are able to hold pretty advanced conversations with people ("Advanced conversations").

Once you have learned the most essential, common vocabulary and phrases of a language, your progress begins to taper off. There is still a lot more to learn, but your progress will not be as visible as before, because the vast majority of conversation consists of the words and structures you have aready learned.

If you continue putting in time and effort, you may achieve writing proficiency and learn to read more and more fluently in the language; however, your speaking skills will improve less noticeably.

Timetable

How long this process takes depends somewhat on your innate language abilities, but even more so on the amount of time and effort you are willing and able to put in. If you spend many hours a day studying the language, it may take as little as 2 months to reach "Getting the hang of it," 3 months to reach "Simple conversations," and 6 months to reach "Advanced conversations." More typical may be 6 months, 9 months, and 18 months, respectively.

However, people who don't make a concerted effort to learn the language can easily get stuck somewhere before the "Getting the hang of it" point. This doesn't mean you're unable to learn a foreign language, but simply that you have fallen into a rut where Russian and Ukrainian are basically irrelevant to your day-to-day life.

The hard part of learning a language is getting to the "Simple conversations" point. Beyond this level, your language knowledge evolves almost by itself. You can learn in the process of speaking and are amply rewarded for your progress. You can increasingly talk to people and get things done.

Reaching "Simple conversations" inevitably requires making some sacrifices. It might mean investing 100-200 hours of book and class study before getting results. It might mean foregoing possible friendships with English speakers in order to maintain your resolve to learn Russian or Ukrainian. It might mean feeling like a child again after two decades of success on the corporate ladder.

Language Goals and strategies

If you're planning a move to Ukraine, consider putting in effort in advance, before you find yourself surrounded by people and circumstances that encourage you to continue speaking English (or your other native language). Obviously, the further you can get in the language, the better off you'll be, but if you can at least get to "Getting the hang of it," you'll be much better off. You might be able to begin having simple conversations with people in Russian or Ukrainian before your life has settled into a rut. A general guideline is 100 hours of study to get to the "Getting the hang of it" level where your progress starts to accelerate.

Part of getting the hang of a language is getting used to the phonetics. Listening to language recordings over and over is a great way of doing this. Another part is becoming familiar with the main grammatical characteristics of the language. Neither of these two areas should be neglected.

If you've been in Ukraine for a while and still haven't reached "Simple conversations," consider signing up for language lessons with a language school or a tutor. This is probably the best way of getting over the hump and reaching a critical mass of language mastery. It doesn't matter if you're a recent college grad or a top-level USAID administrator -- you've still got to go through the same process.

Depending on your day-to-day schedule, you might discontinue lessons once you've reached "Simple conversations," or continue them all the way to "Advanced conversations." The more your work and social circle insulate you from Russian/Ukrainian, the longer you'll probably want to take lessons.

Dealing with frustration

Ukrainian and Russian have difficult grammar and pronunciation that is very foreign to native English speakers and people from western Europe. You will experience the most frustration early on, as you are trying to reach the "Getting the hang of it" point.

Frustration is basically a kind of mental tension that arises from trying to do something that is too hard for you at the moment. Experienced language learners avoid frustration and tension by not trying to understand or learn things that they are not yet ready for. If you encounter something that begins to cause frustration, simply make a mental note of the thing and move on to something else. Chances are it will eventually make sense or come more naturally when you return to the topic in the future. There is always something that you are ready to learn at this moment in time. These are the things to focus on.

As a teenager, I spent a year in Slovakia living with a host family. Over the year, I filled a few notebooks with "useful words" that I had copied from the dictionary. After the end of my year, I reviewed the notebooks a final time and realized that I had only incorporated about a quarter of the words into my active vocabulary. This is a typical symptom of not focusing on the material you are ready to learn at the moment.

Instead of deciding what you think you need to learn, try focusing instead on the things you hear around you that you get the gist of but do not understand 100%. These are the words and phrases that, if you look up in the dictionary, you will never forget. By choosing the correct moment to focus your conscious energy on learning a word or phrase, you can reduce the amount of effort it takes to incorporate it into your active vocabulary by 10 or 20 times.

The trick is to increase your exposure to the language, letting your subconscious absorb the sounds and structures, and focus your conscious efforts only on the things that are already familiar to you but that you would not yet be able to use yourself.

UPDATE 2016:

I have finally decided to teach others my method for learning and mastering foreign languages at www.FrictionlessMastery.com. Take a look and download or order my book and/or instruction manual. My views and methods have are clearer and more evolved than what I wrote here.

The Curse of the Amero-European Expat

So you've come to Ukraine to travel, work, date, or just live or whatever. Like most other expats, one of your goals here is to learn the language. After all, how are you going to get around, interact with people, and feel safe?

"Strraff-st-phooey-tye!" you say to the border guard, proud of your progress after a few hours of language cramming the day before your flight. The guard doesn't answer. After scrutinizing your passport and checking something in the computer, he asks you, "Vatt is dee purpus ahv yore dzhurnee?"

For a good many American and European expats, with this interchange the pattern is set for the next X years of their life in Ukraine.

It is all too easy to be enveloped in a cocoon of English and be unable to break free of it after settling down in Ukraine. In this post we'll examine how this happens. In tomorrow's post we'll see what, if anything, can be done about it.

1. Your work. Chances are 100 to 1 that your work in Ukraine involves using your native language (or English). Though there may be Ukrainians around you at work speaking Ukrainian and/or Russian, chances are your work doesn't involve understanding what they are saying to each other or participating in their level of discussion. Everyone you really need to interact with at work speaks English and/or your other native language and is eager to improve their skills for professional and personal reasons.

Any Russian or Ukrainian you pick up generally will not be rewarded with additional professional opportunities. If you start inserting Russian or Ukrainian phrases at work, coworkers may find it endearing, amusing, or annoying, but it's unlikely they'll actually start speaking with you in their language. After all, part of the reason they hired you is so that they can practice English with you.

2. Your social circle. When you come to another country, you need to make new friends with whom to do things and share experiences and feelings. Generally, true friendship requires an advanced level of language mastery, so for the time being you start making friends with the people you work with or meet along the way who speak your language well enough to have real conversations.

You may think, "eventually I'll have more friends that I speak Russian/Ukrainian with," but this day might actually never come. First of all, are you just going to get rid of all your old English-speaking friends and find a crop of new ones when you reach a certain language threshold? Or do you expect that after years of speaking to each other in English you and your friends will just suddenly switch to Ukrainian or Russian (or Surzhyk)?

As you develop friendships with English (or German, or French, etc.) speaking locals, their language mastery will be improving month after month, making it harder and harder to ever catch up in Russian/Ukrainian to their level of English. After a year of friendship, chances are they've reached an advanced level of fluency. Meanwhile, you're still wondering why people sometimes say "девушка" and other times "девушку".

3. Prestige. The least prestigious languages in Ukraine are Ukrainian and Russian. They vie for last place, with Russian winning in the west and Ukrainian in the east and south. The most prestigious are English, German, French, and Italian. Therefore, by befriending you and speaking your language, your Ukrainian friends are increasing their prestige.

When you come to Ukraine and many other less wealthy countries, you receive an added degree of status simply by virtue of being from a wealthy country. If you go around speaking a prestigious language, you further secure your higher status.

You may think you're the fortunate one walking around with your trophy wife/girlfriend. The fact is, it's she that's got the trophy boyfriend/husband. By speaking to you in English, she's in a sense flaunting her trophy. If she's dressed to kill, then you're even.

If you try instead to speak Ukrainian or Russian with people, you may sense that your status actually drops. In fact, the better you speak it, the less different you appear, the more accessible and understandable, and hence the less prestigious. Splendid -- now that you can converse freely with babushki, your yuppy Ukrainian friends aren't as interested in you anymore.

Finally, no matter what your fluency in either language, you'll still get people addressing you in English who expect you not to speak anything else. Among acquaintances, even after you've established your total fluency in Ukrainian or Russian people will still occasionally start speaking to you in English hoping that you'll practice with them. I sometimes feel like I'm letting people down by speaking their language. I have probably sacrificed dozens of potential casual friendships with ambitious young Ukrainians simply because of the fact that I am already fluent in their language and don't wish to spend more time in Ukraine speaking English. On the other hand, I've gained many friendships with other categories of Ukrainians.

4. Adult time constraints. Even if, after all the above, you still wish to learn to speak Russian or Ukrainian, your work, social engagements, and domestic duties may leave you little time and energy to devote to language study.

It probably takes 100 hours or more of focused study to really get a grip on the basics of a language, especially one with grammar as difficult as Russian or Ukrainian. If you only have a couple hours a week available, you may feel like you just can't get far enough quickly enough to make it all worthwhile.

Furthermore, an adult lifestyle usually involves settling down to live alone or with one other person (most likely your English-speaking companion) and spending much of your waking time at work (where you're using English with a consistent circle of people).

As a student you have much more exposure to different groups of people, and your circle of friends and contacts is constantly changing. Such an environment is much more conducive to language learning because you are continually starting over again and have far fewer obligations and committed relationships. It's a lot easier to just start speaking Russian or Ukrainian with new acquaintances and to distance yourself from people you don't want to spend time with anymore.

As an adult, your life is defined by habits and routines. Once language habits are established and routines set, it can be very difficult to find room in your life for a new language that would shake everything up.

In the next post we'll discuss how one might go about learning Russian or Ukrainian despite all this.

UPDATE 2016:

I have finally decided to teach others my method for learning and mastering foreign languages at www.FrictionlessMastery.com. Take a look and download or order my book and/or instruction manual. My views and methods have are clearer and more evolved than what I wrote back in 2010.

Getting to Know People through Language Exchange

In Ukraine and don't know how to meet people? An excellent way is by participating in language exchanges through the "Language Exchange Club," organized by U.S. expat John Carragee.

Here is the page for the Language Exchange Club Kyiv, and here is the page showing other cities where something similar is going on.

Basically, these are groups of people who get together somewhere (usually an inexpensive, cafeteria-style restaurant) and speak to each other in a certain language -- English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, French, etc. depending on the group. There is no set topic -- you just have a seat and talk about whatever you feel like.

There is almost always at least one native (often several) of the language being spoken who is present at each meeting. The others are people who have learned the language and need practice. Many have professional or personal ties to the language and the country where it is spoken.

There is a mixture of ages and genders, but perhaps a slight majority of attendees are women, and the most common age group is 20-28. Admittedly, it is somewhat rare to see people over 35 at the meetings.

You can get a bite to eat or a cup of tea or something to snack on while you're talking. In Kiev, most meetings are at the Puzata Khata restaurant near the Kontraktova Ploscha metro stop.

Meetings typically last about two hours, and sometimes people continue afterwards by going to a pub or going on a walk.

If you're learning Russian or Ukrainian, this is a great place to practice. If you're looking for a private language tutor, you might find one here (though not necessarily a professional).

Attendees are generally quite friendly and open to making new friends. You will also meet interesting people from other countries who have also come to Ukraine for some reason.

Comment
in my experience it seems this format is best for those who are already at an intermediate speaking level with a working vocabulary of 1000-1500 words and more. If you're a lower intermediate Russian speaker and go to the Russian club meeting, you might well end up talking in English with locals who are eager to practice their English. Or, you might get lucky and find someone who is patient enough to listen to your slow speech and have a conversation with you in Russian.

UPDATE 2016:

The Language Exchange Club is alive and well, though founder John Carragee died of cancer some years back. I actively attended a number of clubs in Kiev through 2011, then created the Tbilisi Language Exchange Club when I moved to Georgia in late 2011. We have the same thing going there now, with 10+ languages meeting weekly or monthly.

The Russian and Ukrainian clubs in Kiev were basically dead when I last visited in January 2016. Nobody goes and they are looking for new organizers. 

I have finally decided to teach others my method for learning and mastering foreign languages at www.FrictionlessMastery.com. Take a look and download or order my book and/or instruction manual.