Conversational Ukrainian language course for IDPs has started at UzhNU

Today, Ukrainians are experiencing unprecedented unity when it comes to the protection of the Ukrainian language - 83% of respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language in Ukraine. Moreover, the events of February 24, 2022, induced a lot of Ukrainians to switch to the Ukrainian language. However, many people are on the verge of giving up this idea becase of their fears to make mistakes, sound "funny", not remember the right word, "spoil" the language, etc. In order to make this task easier for the Ukrainians who were forced to leave their homes due to russian aggression, UzhNU launched a free conversational Ukrainian language course. It takes place every Tuesday, at 11 a.m., in Aura Academica student space in student hall of residence #4. Anyone can join.

The course is taught by Anastasiia Vehesh, associate professor of the Ukrainian language department of the Faculty of Philology: "People of any age, professions, with different levels of language knowledge can join us, the main thing is their desire and firm intention to learn. Our main task is to overcome the language barrier. Undoubtedly, all Ukrainians speak the Ukrainian language to one degree or another. However, as François Voltaire once said: "You can master a foreign language in six years, but you have to learn your mother tongue all your life."

Due to the fact that the students of our course have been Russian-speaking for most of their lives, they make typical mistakes. We all gather here to get rid of the fear of making mistakes. Basically, we will study speech culture, violations of language norms: lexical, orthographic, stylistic, syntactic, etc. Each lesson will be devoted to a certain topic. Today, for example, we will get to know each other and everyone will tell a few words about themselves. On the basis of their stories, we will single out mistakes that are worth paying attention to. These are often common language mistakes made by many Russian-speaking Ukrainians who have decided to switch to Ukrainian. I admit that at first I was worried how to talk about the language with the people who had fled from shelling. However, in our last lesson, we talked about language as an element of statehood, and I can note that everyone understands how important language is now."

Emphasis was placed on internally displaced persons living in the halls of residence that belong to Uzhhorod National University. Currently, their number exceeds 1,200 people. UzhNU Vice-Rector Ihor Korol notes: "This is one of our initiatives that we are carrying out together with the Department of Education and Science, Youth and Sports of the Transcarpathian Regional State Administration. First of all, the courses were created at the request of the residents and administration of the halls of residence. People realize that the events taking place now are irreversable, and express their desire to finally switch to the Ukrainian language. All of them understand Ukrainian perfectly, but in order to start communicating in it all the time, they need a certain impetus and our courses will help them to do it. We decided to hold classes in hall of residence No. 4, because currently the largest number of internally displaced persons live here - about 640 people. However, enyone can join the training. It is common knowledge that one of the motives for the russian attack according to russian propaganda was "the protection of the Russian-speaking population", which they also considered "their population" because of the language. Many people made the right decision to dissociate themselves from this paradigm, they do not want to associate themselves in any way with the "Russian peace", which has brought so much suffering to all Ukrainians."

 

• Social activities,
• Uzhnu for migrants