Grammar

This page is a short map of Ukrainian grammar before you go into the details. You will see the main ways it differs from English: words change their endings, every noun has a gender, nouns have cases, verbs show the person in their ending, and word order is freer. Each point is only previewed here. The topic pages explain it properly.

You don’t need any grammar terms to start. Where a term comes up, it is explained in plain English.

Words change their endings

In English, book stays book whether it is the subject or the object of a sentence. Word order tells you who does what. In Ukrainian, a noun’s ending changes to show its job in the sentence.

Changing the ending of a word like this is called inflection. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs all inflect in Ukrainian. That is the biggest single difference from English, and most of the grammar pages are about it.

Every noun has a gender

Ukrainian nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter. This is true of things and ideas as well as people and animals. The dictionary form often hints at the gender, but not always, so it is best to learn each noun together with its gender.

Gender matters because other words agree with the noun: words for my, adjectives and past-tense verbs change to match it. Nouns and gender covers this.

Cases, in brief

A case is a set of endings for one job in the sentence: the subject, the direct object, “to someone”, “with something”, and so on. Ukrainian nouns have seven cases. The dictionary form is the nominative, the case of the subject. Where English often uses a preposition (with a knife), Ukrainian often uses a case ending instead, sometimes together with a preposition.

The table shows all seven singular forms of кни́га. It is here only to show what “seven cases” looks like. You don’t need to learn it yet. Cases, an overview introduces them one step at a time.

The forms come from the paradigm in Горох. The descriptions in the last column are rough guides, not full rules. The locative is also called the prepositional case. Notice that two cases share the form кни́зі, and that the г of the stem becomes з before the ending -і. Patterns like this are why the cases get their own pages, introduced in stages.

Verbs show the person

A Ukrainian verb in the present tense has a different ending for each person: I, you, he/she/it, we, you (formal or plural) and they. There are six endings for six persons. Here is чита́ти (to read).

Ukrainian has two words for you. Ти is for one person you are close to. Ви is for several people, or politely for one person. The ending also shows who is meant, so the pronoun can often be left out: Чита́ю. already means “I am reading”. The present tense covers both English I read and I am reading.

Word order is flexible

Because endings show who does what, Ukrainian word order is much freer than English. The usual neutral order is subject, verb, object, like English. Moving words around changes the emphasis, not the basic meaning. New or important information tends to come at the end. Ukrainian also has no words for a or the, and in the present tense it usually leaves out is and are. Sentence structure explains all of this.

Reading order

Read the grammar topics in this order. Each one builds on the one before.

Going further

Once you have read the topics above, these pages go deeper. The Next link at the bottom of each page takes you through them in this order, from noun plurals to word formation. You can also go straight to the group you need.