Russian vs Ukrainian: what makes them different? 

To try everything Brilliant has to offer - free - for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/polyMATHY . The first 200 to sign up will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription. The thumbnail is from a linguistic map of self-reported speakers of Ukrainian, Russian, Surzhyk, and other languages as studied in 2011: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Slavic_languages#/media/File:Lenguas_eslavas_orientales.PNG It is not a political map. I have drawn the correct political boundaries on the maps in the video. Слава Україні.

I'm native ukrainian speaker. You don't have an accent in ukrainian but you have an accent in russian! You're well done! I'm shocked!

As a Polish-speaker, I understand Ukrainian if I listen very closely but it's very limited. Slavic languages are very similar but different as a whole.

In ukrainian you can also simply use "бо" for "because", "тому що" is more formal and mostly used in literature, than in spoken language.

It is very fun that you study Russian and pronounce Russian words with a strong English accent, but Ukrainian words without any accent.

Excellent video! I’ve been learning Ukrainian for three years now. It’s my fifth language and my first Slavic language. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed learning a language more than I have with Ukrainian. Дякую за відео, друже! Українська мова є гарна й неймовірна!

In fact I've never seen a non-ukrainian guy who knows Ukrainian and Russian as well as you. You seem to make a lot of research for your videos as well. Thank you for your high-quality content!

I speak both Ukrainian and Russian and this video was really interesting for me. I'm from Moldova. We are also mostly bilingual here. Russian is my first language and I speak Romanian as well Ukrainian is my 4th language. Because Moldova is situated between Romania and Ukraine I had an aportunity to watch Ukrainian tv from childhood and at age 12 I started slowly learning Ukrainian and three ears ago being 19 I got really obsessed with this language. Now I'm pretty good at speaking and understanding Ukrainian.

That’s interesting that Ukrainian seems to be comfortable to the English-speaking mouth. As a Russian-speaking Ukrainian I can hear the strong accent when you speak Russian, but very clear Ukrainian. That’s pretty cool

Ukrainian and russian are very different. I am a polish language native speaker, and even I don't know how to speak russian or ukrainian, but when I'm listening to someone speaking ukrainian I can understand about 80% of it, and when someone is sepaking russian maybe 30% of it. The vocabulary beetwen Polish and Ukrainian is very simular. Edit: Sorry, I actually listened to Ukrainian a bit (and studied on Duolingo), a little bit earlier, but even before that I understood lot of from it.

Wow! As Ukranian, I can surely tell you have brilliant pronunciation. Best I've heard from a foreigner

Дякую вам за вашу працю 🇺🇦

Thank you for your support that you've elegantly weaved into the video by deliberate choosing of the live speech samples

The interesting thing is that it's can be more difficult to see the difference between Russian and Ukrainian when Zelenskyi is speaking, since he's originally a Russian speaking person, and has started to speak Ukrainian better just when became a president, so you can hear a lot of Russian accent in his Ukrainian. He definitely says a lot of Russian "е" sounds instead of Ukrainian "e", sometimes he says a lot of "a" sounds where he needs to put "o" sounds. It's just for information from a native Ukrainian & Russian speaker! Thanks for your video, some things were actually new to me :) 💙💛

The hard /g/ is also present in Ukrainian, but it's quite rare and used mostly in foreign loanwords and proper names. It's spelled Ґ, e.g. ґрант (grant), Ґренада (Grenada), Ґодзілла (Godzilla).

I'm native Ukrainian/Russian speaker, and I can tell you've done such a good job! Also funny thing about lexical similiarity: Ukrainians and Belarussians can commuticate with each other if one gonna speak Ukrainian and another Belorussian))) We can understand each other languages without learning them))) But it doesn't work with Russian.

As a Scot, we have the same issue here in Scotland with people thinking/claiming the Scots language is a dialect of English or slang, when it is in fact its own language, with numerous dialects of its own. Sister languages are common (Slavic, Baltic, Scandinavian, Iberian, Celtic) and this video does a great job of highlighting that similarities & mutual intelligibility can occur, but that doesn’t mean each language isn’t distinct!

As a Czech speaker, I can tell the difference between Ukrainians and Russians speaking my native tongue, there is a noticible difference between their accents... different phonological struggles I suppose. Nice video, Luke. Děkuji

As a Polish speaker, I find it much easier to listen to Ukrainian than to Russian

10:00 i really love how excited he sounds talking about the differences in vowel quality. it's so admirable and i love it!!

Thank you so much for this video and for paying attention to the topic.

As a native speaker of Ukrainian, I have to say that I did learn something new about my language through interesting perspective without any hint of sarcasm. 👍

It's very interesting that you made a comparison with catalan, and mentioned some of its linguistic features. As a catalan native speaker, I understood immediately the relation between russian and ukrainian you wanted to explain. For mentioning my language, here's my like!

As a Ukrainian-speaking person, I must admit that you have a good pronunciation of Ukrainian

Excellently put together, Luke. You inspire me to keep on learning, so thank you... Your content goes from strength to strength, so much so that I recommend you to my students. Grazie, fratello

I'm Czech and I've been learning russian for like 12 years now. When it comes to Ukrainian I would have trouble speaking since I haven't learned the language exclusively but when I hear it either my russian skills help me or I even pick up a lot of things that are different in russian but are used in my own native language.

for me as south slavic speaker i can understand partially both but for my ear ukrainian has more polish influence. Thank you for this video, is amazing 👏

Great! Just what I've been trying to find.

All in all, thank you for the video. It's very interesting and informative.

The video is highly accurate. You've surely done a whole lot of research! Here are some interesting things I'd like to add: - As you said on the example of letter B, in Ukrainian many letters actually have a wide variety of different pronunciations which depend completely on the mood/region of the speaker - The И in Ukrainian sounds really weird if pronounced as Russian ЬІ, and also occurs in positions, where it's difficult to pronounce for Russians. Which is why there are jokes about identifying Russian spies/saboteurs by asking them to say "паляниця" (a woman on Russian state TV tried to say it, but failed) - The letter Щ is also pronounced very differently from one speaker to another, it can vary from soft ɕː to ʃ (sh) or ʃt͡ʃ (shch). The last one is a formal pronunciation, I guess - In daily Ukrainian speech I'd say that it's 1:1:1 of words "Так", "Да" and "Та", though "Так"is the only formal word - In Ukrainian, if it's not a formal conversation, you also usually use intonation a lot, which makes Ukrainian conversations sound a bit like Italian to me - If you come to Ukraine and listen how native people speak, you will most certainly hear суржик, which is a mix of Ukrainian (usually a dialect of Ukrainian) and Russian (you mentioned it). So to understand it you probably have to know both languages well, because many words used in суржик are actually Russian words with Ukrainian grammar or phonology, or even some weird combinations of words from both languages. Moreover, it has its own unique sounds, which usually come from the dialect on which the суржик is based. There are no rules of суржик and it's phonology and vocabulary only depends on the speaker and environment. It is most commonly spoken in Eastern and Central regions (official data is ~22%, but I think it's actually 30-35%). It is still spoken, but not so commonly (3-5%) in Western Ukraine, where it changes to a mix of Ukrainian and Polish/Hungarian/Romanian. Here's an example of sentence in суржик: Він балака по тіліфону, а жінка йму каже "возьми лучче води чуть-чуть і добав до тіста". Try to figure out the meaning! Thank you for your amazing work! I'm an old fan of your channel and I was glad to see you are interested in my language. Your pronunciation is not ideal, but surely good and quite authentic! P.S. thank you as well for telling about the political situation in my country. International support is extremely valuable for us. It's good to understand we are not alone in this. Мир і свобода!

From the perspective of someone who speaks neither language, Ukrainian sounds to me vaguely like if Russian was actually pronounced as spelled. Almost as if it's an older, more conservative version of East Slavic. Sort of like European Portuguese. Incidentally, Russian did used to have "i," but they got rid of it after the October Revolution.

Зачем я смотрю это в 4 часа ночи? Когда и так всё это знаю, еще и на работу утром вставать...

Your work is super cool in the start, but at the end I was speechless, thank you!

To me, Ukranian and Russian are like Portuguese and Spanish - mutually intelligible in some extend but definately not the same language.

There's also the apostrophe that is used in Ukrainian to connect vowels and the consonants in the words in some cases. You did a great job! It is nice to see an unbiased opinion about the Ukrainians. Thank you!

I'm ukrainian and I am very surprised that a non-native speaker could correctly pronounce our sound "щ"))) I can speak English and German, I traveled a lot, talked with Europeans, Americans, for them it is a real test to pronounce ukrainian correctly "щ" or "и". You really well outlined the problems of similarities and differences between Ukrainian and Russian, well done!

thx you a lot for clarifying these differences

Honoured by the shout out Luke, thanks alot! Something that annoys me in that perceptual difference topic is the persistent habit among people to take for granted that any geopolitically “smaller” language is necessarily a dialect of geopolitically “bigger,” ones, like in that video you made about dialects. Many people will hear the similarity between Ukrainian and Russian, and jump to to the conclusion that the former can only be a dialect of the latter. As a native Mazandarani speaker, a northwestern Iranian language, I always have to argue to prove that it’s not merely a dialect of Persian, which is a southwestern one. Then having grown up in the Languedoc region of France, it’s the same with Occitan in regards to French, and Catalan in regards to Spanish as you mentioned. My Venetian and Sicilian speaking friends can add even more to the subject hehe. In any case, thanks for the indepth overview of the subject!

I honestly believe “western” categorization of my own language than the official national one. As a mandarin speaker I'm suppose to believe Cantonese or Wu or Mandarin are all dialects of the same language is the most ridiculous thing ever to me.

Respect for using those videos as examples!

Great video and perfectly explained the difference between the languages, which in my opinion is very important, especially as a Ukrainian native speaker :) Thanks a lot for your support 💙💛 Also, we have the unique letter 'ґ' sounds 'g' :) Yeah is confusing and completely different than 'г' :) Good luck :D

Greetings from a Latvian with a mixed east slavic background! I speak Russian natively and understand Ukrainian very well, better than our Russian neighbors, so be sure that you did a great job :)

I do get the confusion too when I listen to both, sounding similar but different from each other from the same family. Thank you Luke for enlightening us once again.

So thankful for this video🙏🏻 I used to work in company where a lot of my coworkers were from USA. And it felt really good when instead of learning russian they have started to learn Ukrainian. True also that all ukrainians speak both languages and in bigger cities English is the third one

Wow! Amazing video, thanks for your efforts

3:50 Ukrainian also have letter " ґ " - "g". "Ґрунт (grunt)"- soil, "ґрати (graty)" - lettice, "ґедзь" (gedz') - gadfly... Ukrainian Ґ = russian Г (phonetically). In Ukrainian you can also find "w" sound, written as "в" before next non-vocal letter and in the end of the word. So Ukrainian also have sound as belorussian, only without special/unique letter for it. For example: "впав" - wpaw, "винив" - vynyw, "бігав" - bihaw, but "везти" - vezty, "воля" - "vol'a".

Thanks for that Luke. As an ethnic Serb, I can understand most spoken Russian - especially once you get over the different stresses. The fact that “shto” is realised as something sounding like the Serbian and Croat “shta” etc. helps. Account for a whole lot of palatalisation (not common in the Ekavian that I speak) and you’re sorted. But Ukrainian… sounds almost like Polish to my ear! Certainly very different! I love both languages and cultures. And I hope this war ends soon - with Ukraine keeping its sovereignty. Слава Україні!

I am so impressed with this in-depth video. as a Serb, this talk about Slavic languages has me thinking about one of the more notorious rules in Serbian (& Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin!) which states: "Write as you speak. Speak as you write." This was established in the 19th century in the reform that merged the spoken and written language into one. This means that all letters make the same sound wherever they are in a word. This doesn't really apply to vowels as they do have varying length and stress, but consonants follow it in virtually all cases. I was always curious about whether other languages also had anything similar. Just saying this as it could make an interesting topic for a future video!

woowww i really liked this video, could you do more on this? about distinguishing pairs if similar languages? 💯

My wife is ukrainian and I can tell you a few things: -ukrainian for part of its vocabulary is closer to polish (in both language yes is tak, in russian da) and in general it seems more autenthically slavic (the names of the months are all slavic, in russian they are similar to ours because they use the latin etymology). Russian underwent some europification taking some vocabulary from french (like floor that is етаж in russian like french, but in ukrainian it's a slavic name) -part of the vocabulary has an influence from turkish due to the proximity with the crimean kaghanate, for instance watermelon is kavun both in ukrainian and turkish, while in russian is arbuz, like in polish; coffe is kava both in ukrainian and turkish, while it's кофе in russian. You will have fun studying ukrainian 🙂 -in the case system, ukrainian possesses the vocative, russian doesn't

There is a fun detail about Russian spoken in Ukraine: the "г" in Ukrainian-Russian is commonly colloquially pronounced as /ɣ/ like in the Ukranian "г". One would assume that is a direct influence of Ukrainian, but it also occurs in Russian dialects that are part of what would be the areas of a dialect continuum between the languages. Also, I have noticed less vowel reduction in some speakers of russian in Kiev with the "O' being pronounced with a full "O" where it would be expected an schwa sound. I am only counting the people I know speak it as their first language. I am not a native speaker of russian and my knowledge of it is limited, but one might wonder if that is not part of an ancient language continuum to some extent. Nice video! Thanks for making it. :-)

Thanks for this video, was interesting for your opinion about differences. Good job and perfect pronunciation of Ukrainian words.

Good job 👌. It was interesting to listen.

When people ask me to explain the difference (I am Ukrainian, know both languages) I tend to say, that Ukrainian is much "softer". We tend to have a lot of soft consonants.

At 22:56 you can hear the boy say "папа будет помогать" ("dad will be helping") pronounced with a distinctive Kiev accent, where instead of the 'g' sound in the word "помогать" of standard Russian you can clearly hear the 'h' sound ("помахать" - same as "to wave", like in "wave your hand"). Interestingly, native speakers of Russian from Kiev tend not to notice the substitution of 'g' with 'h' and will strongly deny the existence of the phenomenon.

Nice job, thanks for it :)

I like your Щ , good job , nice pronunciation . Great video as well!

I'm from Poland. Over the past month, I have learned to distinguish between these two languages ​​flawlessly. Previously, it seemed impossible to me, although I was aware of the difference.

Such a wonderful video, Luke! Thank you so much! Not only was the information on the two languages most interesting, but you also managed to deliver the important context in a heartwarming and delicate way. And the closing credits have been the final pun: Someone somewhere (with a very long table) did not listen to Zauberflöte often enough.

The German example showed the noun „Weg“, which has a long vowel but the pronunciation was for the adverb „weg” which is short. Thanks for your videos!

Great learning. Thanks!

I loved the linguistic pun part XD. Great video as always, Luke!

I wondered this since I first began learning Russian a few years ago. A russian language partner I had told me it sounded like "backwards russian" others have explained it to me by telling me Ukrainian isn't as palatalized and has 0 vowel reduction and no consonant voicing/devoicing. Some sounds are similar but have different quality (like "Ч". Unlike in Ukrainian, this letter in Russian is always palatalized; etc.)

Luke, your example of a reduced в in Ukrainian gave me an epiphany about the language continuity across Slavic lands. Ukrainian “Вони” in Polish is “oni” (similar to Russian “Они” but with an unstressed O) but there is also a colloquial pronunciation associated with the southeast and rural parts of Poland that uses the “W” sound at the beginning of the word. Crazy how the standardisation of language made us less communicative with close neighbours!

About mutual understanding. Most of Ukrainians are bilingual now, so it's very easy for them to understand Russian (they know it). Yet most of Russians do struggle with understanding Ukrainian. And what's interesting, most of Ukrainians don't know Belarussian, and vice verca, yet Ukrainians and Belarussians have a very good mutual understanding. Also: Ukrainians usually use Ukrainian or very close phonetics when speak Russian (they rarely pronounce г as Russians do for example), but Russians don't know and don't understand Ukrainian phonetics. So they easily recognize Ukrainian Russian-speaker. P.S. more simple way to say "because" in Ukrainian is "бо" (bo), it's use kinda depends on tone and words around

I really enjoy these videos. Thanks so much for committing to putting in the time and effort it takes to create them.

From a Polish perspective: Ukrainian *sounds* like Russian, but unlike Russian, I can more or less understand it. Slava Ukraini

thank you for this work)

I really appreciate the work you have done. It is a really nice explanation of the difference between those two languages. Even for me native Ukrainian language speaker, it was very interesting to listen to what differences you had found, because I can hear them, but I can't characterize them. I really appreciate how skilful you were able to show the difference. And I really like your video because it is very nicely shows the difference between this two languages to non Slavic language speakers, which is important to understand nowadays relationships and politics in "Eastern Europ".

Thank You for another amazing video! :) Very well explained for english speaking auditory.

These drone shots are superb! What a fantastic collection of architecture and so majestically captured.

Wow, i am very impressed by the work, that you've done. As Ukrainian i have nothing to add. Perfect 👏

As a Brazilian polyglot, I'd say Portuguese, German and Russian are related to Spanish, Dutch and Ukrainian, respectively, in a very similar manner.

Great analysis! Even as a bilingual Ukrainian/Russian speaker who lived in Ukraine for 12 years, I have never noticed some of the pronunciation nuances that you observed. A few small mistakes: 2:33 The stress in the word іграшка is on the first syllable 20:47 России/Росії is a genitive form, the word in its nominative form is Россия/Росія

The connection you made about subjective cultural perception of languages and dialects to music was spot on. As an anthropologist, I think this is a spot on and creative comparison, and may steal that idea for an article someday. Thank you for an excellent video!

Thank you greatly for the insightful profile on both languages. Although hardly new to a native bilingual, I'm getting to grasp the true difference, especially in the phonology, prolonged vowels in Russian make it quite distinctive while Ukrainian literally covers your ears with bold exact sounds not found in most Russian dialects. Big thanks you for pointing put the difference between them as it should be known. It still lacks recognition, but you do a vital work 😊

You have a very good pronunciation of Ukrainian words. It feels like a Ukrainian is making a video for an English-speaking audience. I would like to add and clarify for your viewers that indeed all Ukrainians are bilingual by birth. Also, as a Ukrainian, I can say that we understand 80-90% of the Belarusian language. Belarusian and Ukrainian are very similar, and if necessary, we can communicate in our languages ​​without problems, and understand almost everything. Ukrainians can understand Polish if they listen very carefully and find many words similar. Belarusians are also bilingual and understand Russian. Russians do not speak any language. Neither Belarusian nor Ukrainian. Thank you for your work. Great job, it was interesting!

Thank you for finally helping me understand why the Ukrainian family friends I grew up with always pronounced the name of the city they came from as Lviu instead of Lviv as it's written.

I like what you did here, in addition to just comparing the two languages. Subtle yet emotional. Respect!

The greatest overview I've ever seen.

Thank you 💙💛 I am a native Ukrainian speaker, and your Ukrainian is great. I am so happy that you showed the difference between our languages and many videos that describ what russions bring to our beautiful land.

'Так' also means "this way (method)" in Russian. I'm quite used to confirm something with "да, так" (yes, this way).

Being Polish American and speaking and understanding some Russian I can understand Ukrainian and read subtitles watching videos from the war what gives me more information available than in media here. The 70% similarities definitely help

Thanks from Kyiv for support and explaining. Гарна вимова, дякую

I know Russian very well and am learning Ukrainian right now. It's long been possible for me to recognise when one is being spoken or the other (though maybe sometimes the odd very short phrase may mislead, because sometimes it's virtually the same), and generally if I listened to Ukrainian for a while I would be able to understand at least what is being talked about, and sometimes the gist or leaning of more specific points. But sometimes you can get utterly lost. And studying it now for a few weeks, using modern immersive methods focusing on mere comprehension to start with, I'm comprehending more and more quite quickly by mere exposure, and picking up many of the words based on the same roots or some of the similar grammar, etc., very quickly, but all the same there is a lot of difference. Many basic words, like 'very', 'but', 'always', etc., etc., are totally different. Plus there are quite a lot of 'false friends' where at least similarity to Russian words totally throws you, and shaking off those associations is very hard because the languages sound similar, the alphabet is almost the same, etc., etc. (there are some misleading elements there too, where the letters for similar 'i' sounds are mixed up compared to the other language, for example. But, yeah, definitely very, very distinctly different, plus any silly Russian nationalist idea that Russian is somehow more the valid one, and the real heir to any common native language, is definitely just wishful thinking. Interestingly a lot of what you encounter as common in modern Ukrainian tends to have more archaic and/or literary connotations or uses in Russian, suggesting the opposite. I'm sure I'll forever confuse the language, so I just hope at least to learn to properly understand Ukrainian. Hopefully after a year of serious regular engagement it'll come together.

Love your channel! This video in particular makes me want to challenge you to learn some Mongolian language haha. It feels very unique to me as far as language commonality goes, maybe not as much with grammar

Excellent video! very clear and informative. As someone who's just been recently getting interested in the matters of Ukrainian and Russian and watching a lot of things regarding Ukrainian language these last days, I got your video as a suggestion in my feed. I was a bit afraid with the title : "the same language ?" that the subject would be handled in a very "oriented", or partial or biased way but I am glad to see it's absolutely not the case! As another person pointed in a comment I always hate it when some people decide that a "smaller" language is nothing but a dialect of the "bigger" language they speak. So once again, I'm happy it's not that type of video :) When it's about Ukraine these days I'm always a bit wary at first with the content from a channel I am not familiar with. But here, it was excellent content ! I don't speak either languages, but I would say Ukrainian seems to be a little easier to handle than Russian (that's just my own feeling), regarding the stressed / unstressed syllabes that change the way it is supposed to sound, all this, well, Ukrainian seems to stick more to what is written. That seems less complicated to apprehend to me. I am a native French speaker, and French is quite "flat", rather constant on the length of each syllable, compared to other latin/romance languages like Italian for example which you can clearly hear when a syllable is stressed and/or longer from one to an other, and this aspect in Russian seems to be more important than in Ukrainian, maybe that is also a reason why I feel Ukrainian is easier to grasp for me. At least as a first impression. I'm delighted I found out your video, I subscribed! And thank you for the other videos you recommend they all seem interesting, I will definitely watch them !

I have studies Ukraine for less than month now and since it is first slavic language I've studied the different alphabets have been very confusing but four minutes this video has already been very helpful!

I wondered how close these two languages were when we all learned about Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Thank you for this timely presentation and the beautiful pictures of Ukraine. Sadly, so much has been destroyed.

wow, your ukrainian sounds like native! One more probably fun fact for you - in ukrainian we have few words - "паляниця, нісенітниця" - that can be easily spelled by russian speaking ukrainians but under no circumstances spelled by russians :) We use them to spot russian sabotage groups from the first days of war.

Thank you for this awesome video! Great job. These languages really different. And it was much more different years ago. Before reformation in USSR (At least Language reformations 1933. You can read about it in internet if you want), which really changed Ukrainian language closer to russian. They wanted to erase Ukrainian identity

That was astonishing! I've never thought about the pronunciation of my language. Now it is so obvious. As Ukrainian with russian language as "firstier" - HUGE RESPECT. Awesome video.

I've lived in Ukraine more than 2 years, and have noticed the same things you bring up. Great job integrating & supporting Ukraine.

Hey, as a German I just wanted to comment on 13:16 - The word you used as an example for devoicing of final consonants in German was "Weg" which is, as you correctly said, the word for "way" as in a path. In this word we can observe devoicing of the [/g] to a [/k]. What you mixed up though was the vowel, which is not an short open e as in the trap-vowel, but rather a long closed e sound (which I think doesn't occur in RP or standard American English). What may have happened is that you thought about German "weg" with a lowercase 'g', which means "away" as in "I went away". In this case, your pronounciation in the video would be correct, here we do have a short open trap-vowel e. While we're at it, a cool note on the side: The devoicing of final consonants occured between old high German and middle high German. You can still see that in the spelling of MHG, for example the word for child, which is "Kind" in modern German, was written "Kint" in the 13th century Palästinalied ("daz ein Magt ein Kint gebar" which would be written "dass eine Magd ein Kind gebar" nowadays). Hope this helped :)

Besides multilinguality we also possess a rarer feature which is interchangeability of two languages in conversation. It is very common to hear both languages in same conversation spoken by their respective native(albeit not necessarily) carriers.

8:45 ohh, my native town. I didn't expect to see it in this random video. Wow. Its definitely made me want to take a walk to this fortress tomorrow, thanks =)

Dear Luke, you are great! As a polyglot, I have enjoyed your wonderful videos on „Scorpio martianus“ and „Polymathy“ for two years. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support for my country! Let me express my sincere admiration! I am a Ukrainian living in Germany.

Jesus, Luke, I as an East German had been learning Russian for eight years when I was a schoolboy. Your Russian pronounciation is much better than the one my teacher (who was East German like me) had to offer. You're a genius, you really are. I teached myself some lessons of Polish because I lived directly at the border to Poland. I have to confess I fell in love with Polish because of its beautiful sound, much more pleasant to my ears than Russian is. But even more pleasant is your voice ♥️ Greetings from Berlin!

Luke, please accept my deep appreciation for your knowledge and diligence. It has been a pleasure to listen to your speeches in and about Latin, although I myself understand the language only partially. Now I would like to add to my appreciation the expression of respect and gratitude for bringing the Ukrainian cause to the attention of your audience. In particular, it is good that you made this poor but brave boy heard. (I myself am not a Ukrainian, but Polish, but the Ukrainian cause is important to me - for fundamental reasons).

Your video is very helpful 👍