Yuri Shevchuk (Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian) has published his latest textbook, Say It in Ukrainian: A Practical Course in Ukrainian Phonetics, through Hippocrene Books. Say It in Ukrainian was created to address the longstanding lack of effective textbook material on phonetics for English-speaking learners of Ukrainian.  The textbook promises to be a critical resource for students striving to speak more convincingly in the contemporary phonetic paradigm actually in use by Ukrainian-speakers across the globe today.

The book consists of two interconnected parts. The first presents a systematic introduction to the Ukrainian sound system, explaining the features that give Ukrainian its distinctive character among the Slavic languages, the pronunciation challenges most commonly encountered by native speakers of English, and the features that distinguish Ukrainian from Russian and other neighboring Slavic languages. The second contains 412 carefully sequenced phonetic exercises, providing focused practice with every phoneme of contemporary Ukrainian in word-initial, medial, and final positions and in the phonetic environments that can transform the quality of vowels and consonants.

 

The course brings Ukrainian’s remarkable diversity into the language classroom. Its exercises are voiced by speakers representing a wide range of ages, regions, social backgrounds, genders, and other dimensions of contemporary Ukrainian pronunciation. Even more distinctively, the recordings feature some of Ukraine’s most celebrated contemporary writers and poets—including Yuri Andrukhovych, Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan, Taras Prokhasko, and Lyuba Yakimchuk. In this way, students encounter pronunciation not as an abstract system of rules, but as a living, many-voiced feature of Ukrainian culture.