Ukrainian, Clearly

About and sources

What this site covers, how its articles are written and checked, the conventions used for stress, transliteration and register, and the references consulted.

On this page

Ukrainian, Clearly explains how Ukrainian works, in English, for complete beginners. Every page explains the patterns behind the examples, so that you can build sentences of your own rather than memorise phrases.

What the site covers

The site teaches standard modern Ukrainian: the language of the current official spelling standard, «Український правопис», in force since 28 March 2026. It is the same orthography as the 2019 edition, with editorial corrections only.

The material is for beginners. It covers the alphabet and pronunciation, the core of the grammar, sentence patterns for everyday situations, and small vocabulary lists. It does not cover regional dialects, and it does not teach mixed Ukrainian-Russian speech (surzhyk) or Russian forms as alternatives.

The grammar pages give beginner generalisations. Where a rule has exceptions, or a statement is a simplification, the page says so.

How the articles are written and checked

The articles are drafted with the help of an AI model and then checked against the references listed below. They are not written by a named expert, and the site does not claim to be. The checks are:

  • Stress: every stressed word in an example, table or list is checked in a dictionary that marks stress, usually Горох or «Словники України». If the dictionaries disagree, or a word has two accepted stresses, it is left unmarked.
  • Spelling: examples follow the current orthography, including the alternation of у/в and з/із/зі.
  • Claims: grammar statements are checked against the dictionaries’ definitions, the orthography, or the English-language sources below. Each page lists the sources it used.
  • Review: each new batch of pages gets a separate accuracy review before it is published: a second pass over the stress, spelling, translations and claims.

Mistakes are still possible. A careful check is not the same as a native teacher’s eye.

Conventions on this site

Stress marks

Ukrainian stress is free and can move, so the site marks it in examples with an accent over the stressed vowel: мо́ва, приві́т. Words of one syllable are not marked. Ukrainian is not normally written with stress marks; they are a learning aid. Stress and transliteration explains this further.

Transliteration

Where the site shows Ukrainian in Latin letters, it uses the official national system of Ukraine, approved in 2010. Transliteration is only a support: the Cyrillic always comes first, and the Latin form is not a guide to pronunciation.

Pronunciation

Pronunciation is described in plain English on the alphabet pages, always as an approximation. English comparisons are checked against published phonetic descriptions of Ukrainian.

Many vocabulary words have a recording by a native speaker. The recordings come from Wikimedia Commons, from the Shtooka and Lingua Libre projects, and each one is credited with its speaker and licence on the page where it is used. A recording is used only when it is of exactly that word, and not for words whose meaning depends on the stress, because a recording cannot show which of the two words it is. Nothing is downloaded until you press a listen button.

The reading texts and the example sentences on the Beginner sentences pages can also be played aloud. These are read by a computer-generated voice (OpenAI text-to-speech), not by a native speaker, and the recordings are not individually checked by a listener. A computer voice can sound less natural than a person and can occasionally put the stress on the wrong syllable, so treat it as a support for reading: the written text, with its stress marks, is the reference.

Formal and informal “you”

Ukrainian has two words for you: ти (informal, one person) and ви (formal, or more than one person). Every example that uses one of them is labelled, so you know which to use. Pronouns explains the difference.

Translations

English translations are natural English, not word-for-word. Where the Ukrainian is built differently, a note gives the literal meaning.

References

These are the references consulted for the site, with what each was used for.

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