Q&A: My Languages

I told about French here but as for Ukrainian, no, we didn’t speak it at home. I can’t even imagine doing something like that. You had to be a major dissident and a very brave person to maintain that level of subversive behavior.

I learned Ukrainian in second grade when I came home from school and started airing the opinions I had picked up there about Ukrainian being a language of peasants and completely unnecessary for cultured people. Nobody despised peasants and proletarians as the Soviet people, and this was the worst kind of insult. My father didn’t appreciate my embrace of Soviet propaganda and made me learn Ukrainian in a day by reading a thick book in the language and then writing a précis of it.

That was passive knowledge, of course. I didn’t have anybody to speak with. The first time a had a chance actually to speak Ukrainian for a sustained period of time and not just an odd phrase here and there was in 2023.

As a college student back in Ukraine, I majored in English and German. I was doing pretty well in German but the whole Germanic thing wasn’t doing anything for me on a personal level. I didn’t feel like the German-speaking version of me was that different from the regular version. I was painfully, tragically shy. Often, I was unable to leave the house because of the anxiety that people would look at me and judge me. I wanted to change that because it’s no life to live at 20 to be cooped up inside like mental invalid. German wasn’t helping with any of it. But I knew what would.

I needed to learn Spanish.