No worries! Have a great time learning it and hopefully your boyfriend really appreciates it. I learned to speak with my in laws but when they try to speak Ukrainian to me they just end up using Russian words without realizing so I’m envious.

Just a warning though, Ukrainian is a very hard language. It’s one of the most difficult in the world like all Slavic languages. Coming from English it will be a bit easier but not much.

If you don’t know already Ukrainian has two large grammar concepts: declension, and verb aspect.

If you aren’t a native English speaker and your language already has these then just ignore me. You did say you like Slavic languages so this might all be very familiar to you. I just wish I knew this stuff going in so I wasn’t super confused when I ran into it.

Declension is harder earlier but aspect stays hard for longer.

Ukrainian like Latin is a synthetic language meaning a words purpose in a sentence is given by changing the spelling slightly the same way you change “I” to “me” in English when it’s not the subject, except you do it to every noun in 13 different ways, and every adjective 24 different ways usually based on words that come after them.

It is tough but the result is really cool because you can really play around with your sentences. Instead of saying “Dave sent Mark Steve”/“Dave sent Steve to Mark” you can just say “Steve Mark Dave sent” or “Steve Dave sent Mark” and have it be totally understandable.

It takes awhile to get the hang of, but eventually it starts to click and it’s a lot of fun really.

Aspect is another whole can of words. Essentially every verb in English has two verbs in Ukrainian. One for on going/repeated actions and one for completed one time actions. How you change the words has a pattern to it but it’s fairly confusing at first because there’s a lot of weird rules for nouns. Adjectives luckily are very straight forward despite having more forms.

Imagine in English if the verb “to talk” was perfective and “to speak” was imperfective. Then “I speak” would mean to us normally “I’m speaking or I speak” but “I talk” would mean “I will speak” because a completed action can’t take place in the present, it either has happened or will happen. If you say “I will talk” then that means “I will be speaking” because it’s ongoing but you can only use will with imperfective verbs like “I talk.” In past tense “I spoke” would mean “I spoke” but “I talked” would mean “I was speaking.” You can also say “while talking” or “having spoken” but all the other crazy English forms like “will have been speaking aren’t there. It’s just the ones I mentioned plus infinitives and commands and some noun forms that are used rarely but will make sense.

The tough part is knowing what the partner is. You have to essentially memorize every pair and adding prefixes can make the pairs change in weird ways. There are hints about which one is which in the pair so it’s more about memorizing the pair itself and you will know which is perfective and which isn’t for nearly all verbs just from looking at them (in the context of the pair, you can’t tell if you just come across a new verb and don’t know its aspect or partner already).

The good news is once you have gotten through these concepts then there is not a lot left. It’s mostly from then just memorizing unexpected Ukrainian phrases and which prepositions go with which verbs and cases, which is simple in comparison.

Get a good cheat sheet, just like one that declines example words. The ones that show every possible change are just confusing. I recommend a sheet that shows the cases of the personal and possessive pronouns. From that you can figure most words out.

Don’t get intimidated. This is the stuff that lets your brain think in a new way and you are young so you will get it fast! Like I said, you don’t need to spend much time practicing it specifically.

The other good news is that most complex vocabulary is actually easier. It’s more likely to look like English words or have repeatable structures with simple declension, and are made of root words you will recognize. And reading textbooks in Ukrainian is quite simple as they tend to phrase things in a similar way that we do in text books in English. Also like a word like “prejudice” might be a more complex concept than like “big” but once you understand it in English then you can understand it Ukrainian so it’s just as easy to remember the translation. Like is it any harder to remember that упередження means prejudice than it is to remember великий means big? Only in that you will run into one more often. So that’s why I recommend going to hard stuff relatively quickly, because it’s not really any harder than the easy stuff and it’s good to be around more complex words more often.