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I admire your ability to add Ukrainian to your languages in addition to Russian. I'm continuing to struggle, getting far too much interference between the cognates. I had the same problem when I tried to add Romanian to my French and (not great) Spanish - the similarities tripped up the differences and vice-versa. My brain is not adept at languages, but eventually - I hope - Ukrainian will come somewhat less awkwardly than it does at present. One huge motivation is to be able to listen to Zelensky and not keep having to pause & re-listed to work out the Ukrainian word I didn't properly get among the near-identical Russian cognates. But the key point is: no one really used to care what language was spoken; today, though, Russian is the language of the invaders and will always now carry a certain stigma.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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