War of words: my language lessons in Ukraine

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, learning a language in midlife and in the middle of a war.

0:20Charlotte Higgins:I went to Ukraine for the first time in September 2022. and at that time I wanted to write one article about the way artists were reflecting on and responding to the war that was unfolding in their country. This is Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian's chief culture correspondent. Visiting Ukraine and meeting the artists and writers and poets under fire totally changed her life. It was even before I went home that I decided I needed to learn some Ukrainian. I suppose initially I wanted to make a connection with people, just to be able to navigate around the city without being completely helpless. But yes, there was a part of me that thought maybe I could get good enough to eventually be able to even read a poem in Ukrainian.

1:09When she got home to London, she began having weekly lessons with Olya Makar, who was exiled in the far west of Ukraine. Olya squeezes in Charlotte's lessons between humanitarian work, helping displaced teenagers.

1:31Now, Charlotte has always thought of herself as a linguist. She studied Latin and Greek at university and considers herself semi-proficient in Italian. But learning Ukrainian was a whole different kettle of fish.

1:46Charlotte Higgins:Learning Italian, I think, perhaps is more of a world of pleasure. You know, you kind of learn what to order in a restaurant and ice cream and where is the cathedral. Well, there was all this in Ukraine, too. But a lot about sadness. I learned all these terrible words for drone and rocket and air raid alarm and bomb shelter. I mean, these are actually necessary words to learn in order to know where to go if there is a bomb attack. So everything was inflected by the war. Four years and multiple trips to Ukraine later, Charlotte has never forgotten how Olja introduced herself. Before the war, I lived in Kyiv.

2:28I love this place and want to live again.

2:34Charlotte Higgins:Before the war, I lived in Kyiv. I love this place and I want to live there again.

2:45Charlotte Higgins:There's so much sorrow in that sentence. It's actually quite a grammatically complex sentence as well in Ukrainian. But yeah, baked into this phrase was the fact that you were actually displaced. You were very happily settled in Kiev before the war. And even in the first sentence that we shared together, there is a sense of loss and longing for home, actually. There's so much in just a simple phrase. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, language lessons from a war zone.

3:22So Charlotte, your first reporting trip to Ukraine, as you've told us, was in September 2022, which was about eight months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Do you remember how you felt embarking on that? Because it's quite a big departure from your previous day job.

3:38Charlotte Higgins:Yeah, I'm chief culture writer of The Guardian, which means that for years and years and years I've done, although I've worked internationally a lot, it has absolutely never been in an active war zone before. So yeah, I had very little idea what to expect. I think at the point that I was going to Ukraine for this first trip, September 2022, Kiev had been extremely quiet. And by quiet, this is the code word for no bombing attacks, for several months. Everyone was saying, it will be fine. It is fine. It wasn't fine in the sense that there was a very serious and deadly cruise missile attack the morning I arrived, which was a sort of baptism of fire, really.

4:27Charlotte Higgins:And every time I've come home, I've always come home with ideas that I want to do next time. And that continues. So I was there in June and I'm going back next month already with a pocket stuffed full of ideas. And as we're going to go and discuss something snagged in you, and we'll discuss that in more detail but why when you got home did you suddenly resolve I've got to learn this language? As a writer on culture I just felt that there would be something somehow wrong about not being able to understand even a word of Ukrainian and I suppose I self-identify as a linguist in some way but I learned Latin and Greek at university but I learned these languages that are wonderful for reading but nobody speaks so I do have this slight obsession with...

5:15You can read the Odyssey in its original but...

5:16Charlotte Higgins:Yeah, I can read the Odyssey. Well, I can read the Odyssey and the Iliad in the original, given a bit of time to work up my rusty Greek. In other words, I sort of, I guess, like to think I can do languages because I studied ancient languages at university. But the reality, Helen, was unbelievably humbling. And I think also, you know, I'm in my 50s. By this point, I apologize to my bosses if this seems like the wrong thing to say when I say I feel like I can broadly do my job but going back and learning a language from scratch it sort of turns you into a child again I mean you know this Helen because well maybe you don't anymore because you are a wonderful linguist your German is fantastic I can speak German that's all I'm not a wonderful linguist but you studied German at university you know what it's like to study a semi-difficult language.

6:12Charlotte Higgins:But maybe you're less familiar with learning something when you're in your middle years. Yeah, sometimes I think my brain's full. And in order to make space for new things, I have to erase some old memories. But somehow I can still remember who won Big Brother series one to five and the runners-up. But I don't have space to remember, you know, the simplest sentence in Spanish when I'm going on holiday.

6:43Charlotte Higgins:I sometimes feel like I imagine that a two-year-old might feel, you know, when little children, when their understanding is clearly outstripping their linguistic capability and they get very frustrated and have a tantrum. Yeah. That's what I feel like.

7:12Conversely, when people do understand you and you make yourself understood, what a feeling.

7:18Charlotte Higgins:It's like a kind of weird charm when you tentatively go into the cafe or the shop and you pull out from deep inside yourself this complicated jigsaw with its ridiculously complex grammar and ask for whatever it is that you need to ask for. And the person on the other end of this communication just sort of nods as if nothing important is happening and just interacts with you completely normally and that somehow this thing has worked. I will say also in Ukraine, one does get complimented, which is one thing that keeps me going is actually people really appreciate that you're having a go at their ridiculously hard language.

8:13Hi. Hello. Hello, Olya. Privit. Privit. Can you hear? Yeah, we can hear you. I can hear you. Hooray. Where in Ukraine are you right now? I'm in the Kapasian Mountains. Oh, lovely. Thank you so much for being with us today, Olya. Can you tell me, were you surprised when Charlotte contacted you, asking you to teach her Ukrainian? Well, actually, when Charlotte contacted me, I thought, wow, this is going to be really interesting. And at that point, I said no to most people who wanted to learn Ukrainian from me, because when the war started, like a lot of people, it was a huge shock for me that divided my life into before and after.

9:05And I wanted to devote as much of my time as possible to helping people and so on. So I had less classes. But when Charlotte contacted me, I thought that I probably have to stay. Yes. And I had a feeling that I would learn a lot from her. And I was right. I must say, I was right.

9:31Charlotte Higgins:Yes. Hello, Olya. It's really, really lovely to hear you speaking so beautifully. In English, I've never heard you speak so much English. And what would you say is difficult about the Ukrainian language? Even a very simple sentence can be surprisingly difficult to say perfectly unless you know quite a lot of grammar. We have three genders. We have seven cases. All verbs come in pairs, like perfective and imperfective and so on. So even when you just want to say something very simple, you have to make all these little decisions. What gender is this noun? What case do I need? Which ending, which aspect and so on.

10:21Wow. And Charlotte has now written a book called Ukrainian Lessons, in which you feature. It's about art in a war, where one of the objectives of the Russians is the erasure of Ukrainian culture. And it's so clear from the book that Charlotte has totally fallen in love with Ukraine and its fiendishly difficult language. But tell me, what do you think is particularly beautiful about Ukrainian? Well, what is beautiful for me is that it's a language that has been deeply important to generations of people. And a lot of people have fought and suffered to preserve it. But it's also an ironic and playful language and it is full of love of life, I could say.

11:03Yeah. And do you think that it's important for journalists like Charlotte and others to learn Ukrainian if they really want to understand Ukraine and why you guys are so determined to keep your independence from Russia? Well, we often hear that war makes everything black and white, but I don't believe that. And I think that the world and the country in war as well has many shades and many nuances. And knowing the language can really help understand all those nuances. so Ukrainians really appreciate it when someone makes even a small effort to speak their language so I think it can open many doors to just to people hearts and their trusts

12:06Charlotte in your book which I loved by the way you write that you decided to learn Ukrainian to feel a bit less helpless to be to be courteous and maybe to also one day be able to read a poem in the Ukrainian original but just the speaking of Ukrainian has become quite a political act hasn't it?

12:24Charlotte Higgins:Yes, it has. And a lot of previously Russian-speaking Ukrainians have switched to speaking Ukrainian during this period of full-scale invasion. And the politicization of language has many historical roots. It's to do at least partly with the Russian repression of the Ukrainian language, both under the Tsars and also under the Soviet Union. So Ukrainian was relegated into being this kind of folksy, peasant-y kind of language that was sort of faintly comical. But actually, Ukrainian does have an incredibly rich culture and literature that we don't know about here, particularly because our racks of penguin classics are not sadly filled with translations from the Ukrainian.

13:15Charlotte Higgins:But in the context of the full-scale invasion, one of the extraordinary and absurd and perverse things that Putin claimed was that he was rescuing the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. Well, that looked very peculiar when he was bombing, say, Mariupol, a city that was full of Russian speakers. and so actually in the light of that that was one of the catalysts for people changing language was well if he just wants to kill us just because we're Ukrainian then what does being Ukrainian mean so people were going back into into family roots or seeking out the literature that they might have had to study at school Ukrainian classics but rereading it with more depth and more enthusiasm and more sense of what it meant to be Ukrainian.

14:09Even Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zelensky, is not a native Ukrainian speaker, right? He grew up speaking Russian. So when the war began, he had to really practice his Ukrainian in public.

14:19Charlotte Higgins:Yes, exactly. And he clearly does sometimes make little mistakes. He's not, it's not his mother tongue. But he's certainly not alone in Ukraine. There are many people who have changed language. and I think it's such a kind of fascinating thing to change language. This isn't in the book because it was a conversation I had only very, very recently and I kind of feel it's also a very tender subject. It's not a subject you can just sort of sit down and blast questions at somebody. But I was talking to a friend about, you know, what does it actually mean to switch language? How long does it take you?

14:55Charlotte Higgins:When do you stop dreaming in that other language? Yeah. And one of my friends was saying, yeah, it took years and years, but there are still memories for me that are in Russian because they were created in Russian. And you write in the book that your brilliant interpreter and fixer colleague Artem, in spite of him rejecting the Russian tongue, there's a book that he keeps under his bed in a box. And that's a Russian book, isn't it? Yes, he told me about how when he was a teenager, he had been a huge Haruki Murakami fan, the Japanese novelist. And at that time, in common with a lot of international literature, it was translated into Russian.

15:40Charlotte Higgins:There were Russian translations available, but not Ukrainian translations available. So what's happened to your Murakami's art term was the question. Well, most of his book collection was in his home village, which is in the Kharkiv region in the east of Ukraine. And they all disappeared because his home village has been under occupation since the spring of 2022. So everything has gone. I'm completely heartbreaking. And he had a couple of Murakamis with him or one Murakami with him in Kiev. and he told me he kept it with him but he kept it in a box under his bed he couldn't quite he wanted to repudiate the Russian language in a way but he couldn't get rid of that because it it was it was such a a testimony of his of his past and his love of Murakami so how could you possibly get rid of that yeah I think those of us who love books can really sympathize as another passage in the book where you're interviewing some Ukrainians who talk about they couldn't bear to throw away the Russian collection so they put it up on a very high shelf.

16:51Charlotte Higgins:Yes that was I was visiting some people I know and they have very high ceilings very small flat very high ceilings and I pointed up and said what what are those books on the top shelf and they said oh those are those are our parents Soviet editions of classics. The sort of sense of these books that had been so scrimped and saved for by their parents or grandparents in the Soviet Union, that there is something hard-won about that, there is something precious about that, and you can't just throw that stuff away. So it's a really, really complicated picture.

17:28Charlotte Higgins:I mean, my teacher once said to me, If you want to start a conversation on a Ukrainian evening, ask about language. If you want to get people talking at a Ukrainian party, just ask about language and everybody will disagree. So you're not just learning Ukrainian, you're entering into a sort of linguistic territory and landscape that is very swiftly changing and is very up for debate and is not stable.

18:12And you write very poetically in the book about learning what you call the elegant, sensuous shapes of the Cyrillic alphabet. And you describe the exhilarating ski slope swoop of the L. Yes, that is correct. The generous expanses of the U letter and the majestic architecture of the TZ, which spreads out its arms and legs like a candelabra. And I thought that was very beautiful. And even Ukrainian letters have become an act of resistance, haven't they?

18:44Charlotte Higgins:They have. You might have noticed, Helen, that I'm wearing a tiny bracelet that's got, it's got the letter Y on it. It's very, very subtle. The reason I have this little bracelet is that it was a kind of a little free gift as a reading by a novelist called Sofia Andrakovich that I attended in Kiev a couple of years ago. And my photographer colleague, Yulia Kortshatova, has got the same one. So it's like sister-colleague thing. And the letter Y, which it looks like an English or Roman letter I with two dots over the top, is not present in the Russian version of the Cyrillic alphabet. It's one of the letters that is unique to the Ukrainian version of the Cyrillic alphabet.

19:29Charlotte Higgins:So it became a sort of subtle indicator of resistance. And in the opening months of the siege in Mariupol, for instance, people would be far too dangerous to do this now, but people would graffiti it on the walls. and you can see it on t-shirts and you know it is a very subtle signifier of this is the Ukrainian language we're talking about here. So the opposite of the letter Z that we saw on the Russian tanks. It is although the letter Z on the Russian tanks is a slightly mysterious thing because Z is it's not actually part of the Cyrillic alphabet at all. It's an encoded thing that definitely means the Russian army is here but it's not actually part of their own alphabet confusingly.

20:13Charlotte Higgins:Better or ask the Russians about that one.

20:18Pro bomby писate legše niż pro poesiu. It is easier to write about bombs than poetry.

20:33And inevitably, the war is the dark cloud that hangs over the whole book and there is a lot of sadness in the book and there are lots of heartbreaking moments. But there is also humour and levity And you really give the impression of Ukrainian people as being a good laugh. And there's quite a lot of black humor in the book. And you write how you can now swear like a Mikolaev dock worker and you have a repertoire of disreputable phrases, many of them learned on long car journeys on reporting trips. Tell me about that. Well, I think it's true that, I mean, my own personal theory is that Ukrainians and British

21:10Charlotte Higgins:people are quite compatible in terms of our sense of humour. It's extremely paradoxical to say, because I think the book is very sad. And that's obviously a reflection of the enormous sadness. But yes, I have laughed a lot in Ukraine. I was in the back of the car with two female colleagues. And to be honest, Helen, I am often trying to find them boyfriends. I mean, not in a hugely serious way, but it is on my mind. Because it's very hard to find a boyfriend in Ukraine if you're a woman in your 30s right now. Because your peers, your male peers, tend to be doing other stuff. Like they're in the army or in the emergency services.

21:55Charlotte Higgins:In all seriousness, the dating scene is very tough. Anyway, we were being a bit silly. I was looking at a photograph of a handsome young Ukrainian man with a nice moustache and I showed it to them in case there was any interest. And one of them just burst out laughing and said this ridiculous Ukrainian phrase,