Language Achievement

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Clarissa

July 3, 2025

My Ukrainian rules. I’m completely fluent. So happy and proud. The first few times I spoke it 3 years ago, it was very painful. And now I prattle up a storm, using current slang and a wide vocabulary.

German is next. Yesterday, my Duolingo chatbot asked if I have a favorite German word. I have two. Überraschend (astonishing) and buchstabieren (to spell). It’s like “stabbing books”, so cute.

I dramatically improved my Ukrainian, German and French in the past year. No age is too late to learn or improve a language.

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5 responses to “Language Achievement”

Anonymous

July 3, 2025

Congratulations on your fluency! Conversational ability always impresses me, because my interest in languages tends to be for reading only, and it always amazes me how much easier literacy is than making conversation. For instance, I recently took a correspondence course in Old Norse with a well-known expert, and I was translating Icelandic sagas within weeks, but I couldn’t order dinner or check into a hotel room in Old Norse to save my life.

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Anonymous

July 3, 2025

I know that sounds silly to say about a dead language, but Old Norse is quite similar to Modern Icelandic, and I couldn’t do either of those things in Icelandic either.

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Anonymous

July 3, 2025

When it comes to the Ukrainian language, though, Prof. Clarissa, I am curious, because I have not yet studied any Slavic language, except for learning the Cyrillic alphabet and a few Russian words, but I have heard that the Ukrainian language lends itself very well to wordplay, and that a lot of Ukrainian humor is linguistic, based on puns and wordplay. Would you say that is true? I’m curious, because I am a big fan of James Joyce, so of course I enjoy linguistic trickery and humor.

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1. Clarissa
  
  July 3, 2025
  
  Yes, the languages that have prefixes and suffixes are great for wordsmithing. I really miss my suffixes in English.
  
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gothmog

July 4, 2025

My favorite German words are “Ungeheuer” (monster), “Genau” (exactly/exacting), and “Grausam” (gruesome). My favorite German idiom I use often is “Tatsächlich” which kind of means (Is that so?) Or (well, I’ll be). It is a compound word where “tat” is (action) and “sache” is (fact), so I guess it’s closer to (Is that a fact?)

Do you have a favorite German idiom? Or a Ukrainian one?

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