Чути українською

Did you know that vowels in the Ukrainian language are approximately five times less than consonants? Have you heard of unsyllabic sounds? And about Schrödinger's letter? Did you know that sibilants constantly mimic other consonants of the Ukrainian language?

To be honest: you know all this. And even if it seems to you that you have no idea according to which principle certain sounds should be pronounced, your language consciousness and speech apparatus do it flawlessly.

The book "Hear Ukrainian" will not force you to learn rules or memorize language laws. Your Ukrainian language and literature teacher once did this. The task of the book is to explain the rules and regularities of the sound system, and also why our alphabet is almost perfect. And, of course, to convince you that the Ukrainian language is extremely interesting, easy and sometimes even useful.

Olga Dubchak is a candidate of philological sciences, professional editor, literary editor, audio editor and editor-in-chief. In short, he wants to talk about it. It so happened that editing became the basis of her whole life, although Olga herself did not plan this.

She was born in Kyiv, in Obolon, which sometimes suddenly affects her speech and attitude to various life situations. She studied in a physics-mathematics class and planned to enter KPI, but the engineering and technical specialties spoke "against". She entered the Faculty of Ukrainian Philology of the National Pedagogical University named after M.P. Drahomanov, because all the district and city olympiads in language and literature that Olga won were in favor. There, she defended her PhD thesis at the Department of Ukrainian Language.

In general, Olga liked studying at school, at the university, further teaching, pedagogical practice, and preparing applicants for the Ukrainian language and literature entrance examination. But there was one problem: neither Olga herself, nor the students and teachers who had the difficult fate of dealing with her, could and cannot understand - why teach the rules if no one remembers them and does not apply them in practice? Why bother with the rule of nines (What is the rule of nines, you ask? That's what we're talking about!) if the word "chips" is misspelled everywhere anyway? In the end: why do we still dream of school lessons on the Ukrainian language, if we remember absolutely nothing from them?

So, it's time to answer all these questions and talk about the Ukrainian language in a way that makes it interesting, useful, and maybe even fun. Although there are no guarantees in this matter, because Olga has no sense of humor at all.

The book "Hearing Ukrainian" is the first of three devoted to the rules of the Ukrainian language, but not what you thought, but others. If you didn't think anything like that, it's even better. In the first book, we will talk about letters and sounds, the principles of their coordination and interaction, try to remember a few words and understand why an apostrophe is cool, and a soft sign is insecure and visits a specialist. Plus a bit of history and interesting facts.

And without humor, of course! This is no time to laugh, my dears.