I started this project two years or so before my mother passed away. It's a quixotic enterprise for sure; all the important people I could share this language with in the way I am hearing it in my mind have passed away. Some friends have commented that it was an excellent undertaking for Covid-19 days. It was. With all the disruptions of the past two years, it's been a good project because it can be picked at with something that resembles diligence and consistency.

Ukrainian is a tough language, not least because of the past two centuries of the land's history, torn between Austro-Hungarians and Poles and Russians and Soviets, mean that its current form (and how best to teach it!) is still a matter of some debate. Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), whose literary heritage is regarded as the foundation of Ukrainian literature--and, to a large extent, the legitimization of Ukrainian as an independent language--was jailed and exiled as a revolutionary for daring to honor his own language as a worthy medium of expression. Most late-life learners of Ukrainian quickly become aware of this political resonance in their learning choice.

All that said, it's a beautiful language, Slavic but sometimes described as "the sixth Romance language," with beautiful rolled Rs and many, many vowel sounds. The nightingale is a prized national symbol. What kind of a lunatic nation takes a tiny brown-feathered songbird as their national emblem?

In today's world, there are multiple resources online for learning Ukrainian. These are ones I've personally found useful:

--Duolingo has a short learning tree (which includes ~⅓ the number of lessons as its French or Spanish counterpart). A fine place to get started.
--Glossika has a full 5,000 spoken Ukrainian sentences--voiced by one of the harshest speakers of Ukrainian I have ever heard. It's only free for 7 days, but is a great resource for improving one's ear. Caveat: it does not exactly further one's sense of the famously poetic character of the language.
--The UK Ukrainian Language organization is an excellent source for beginning pronunciation and for reading. The first three lessons are particularly helpful--before it launches into daunting immersive mode!
--Anna Ohoiko has a beautifully put together collection of language lessons and podcasts at Ukrainian Lessons. This is a free resource, with extras that can be added for a charge. This site has been active for a few years now, so there it a lot of content.
--for flashcards, Anki has some useful language decks (though Ukrainian does not rate as one of their top languages). Access to content requires a log-in. I find the ☀️Ukrainian Language Vocabulary: Illustrated deck particularly good--because it is my own creation and reflects my personal idiosyncrasies.

These sources—they subtly contradict each other, and it is, I find, that peculiar disorderly subtlety that offers my biggest challenge to learning Ukrainian. What is this language I am learning? A Russian influenced variant? A modern artificially nationalist one? Certainly it's not the "pure" ancient tongue of my forebears.

And yet, I find myself enraptured.  Between the 20th century diaspora and the last 30 years of Ukrainian independence--the culture and language are unsettled and in transition. It is a fascinating moment to participate in Ukrainian study.

I've spent the past week working on the Henry L. Zietlow Memorial Trophy project.  My father and I began work on this project almost exactly two years ago, and, finally, it's reached its end stages. In memory, I sense that this work will merge into the unmoored passage of the months through the Covid-19 pandemic; I'll look back on these two years in a very particular time and way that will be marked by a heightened sensation of death and mortality and our places in that arc.

As I write this the pandemic is not over, but its character, post the release of four effective vaccinations this past spring, has very clearly changed. We have a means of protecting ourselves, whether or not we are able, as human beings, to deploy it effectively or humanely. So--the virus has evolved, but so has our capacity to evolve with it.

I read the Nicholas Carey article this morning and found it fascinating. Largely, it's about identity, and questions of self that address the ancient nurture/nature conundrum.

These thoughts are colliding in my head, and then, one of the commentators in Carey's piece chipped in with the quotation that closes this entry.

It pulled some ideas together in my mind about all the things I've written above. Not in a way I could express here--that would take hours of writing and revision for a piece that is meant to be short.

But also it made me want to read Of Human Bondage, to find the context for these words.

We live in an amazing age when it comes to family documentation.  Philip Sampson was my grandmother's older brother.  He was one of the soldiers who participated in that famous "Christmas in the trenches."

Thanks go to my cousin Julie, for finding, and sharing, this article with me.

I accept that the world is changing, but this change, this closing of my used bookshop--it's a bad one.

I am currently going through a French language obsession. Or, more precisely, a French word obsession. In trying to understand why, I'm seeing myself loitering (with great pleasure) at the building blocks stage of things.

I'm very much enjoying these Sicklemoon decks on Tinycards (that's a vocabulary App, a subsidiary of the language learning Duolingo program, and a log in is probably needed to see them). Each of these decks, like a sort of "sonnet plus one," has fifteen entries, each on a closely related theme. I think that's related to the way the program is set up, but to me, they are like fifteen word poems, introducing me, almost from a child's point of view, to snippets of French life: "Les Animaux de L'Étang." "Les Animaux de la Plage." "Les Fruits de la Forêt."

The pond one is a particular favorite (also the berries). Who needs to know the French words for waterstrider and whirlygig beetle? Evidently... me.

They're words--they are names--in an Ursula K. Le Guin sort of sense. Knowing the names... I think that still bestows real power--even if only a brief flare of it.

And... drat. The formatting has cropped off the accent aigu from the capital "E" of étang.

Actually, I was tidying something boring and this sketchbook turned out to have been shoved in there by mistake.

I'm pleased that it turned up, and really like what I'd forgotten I had drawn.