Take a quick glance (or погляд) at a sample chapter of Learn Ukrainian by the Roots

When people first start learning Ukrainian, their initial reaction to the vocabulary is often: "Where do I even begin? Everything looks completely foreign." That’s exactly why I built this handbook. Instead of forcing you to memorize thousands of isolated flashcards, my goal is to show you that Ukrainian vocabulary is built on a logical system of core Indo-European roots. Once you understand the root engine, thousands of words unpack themselves automatically.

To show you how this works in practice, I’m opening up the blueprint and walking you through a complete, unedited look at the near-final draft for Chapter #40: гляд- to look, glance, watch across three pages.

Whether you’re a complete beginner looking for memory hooks or an intermediate learner trying to master prefix logic, this chapter shows exactly how the system works.

Page 1: The Etymology Engine & Prefix Mechanics

1. The Surprising English Sister to Ukrainian гляд-

We start every single root with its ancient origin. Did you know that when you use the Ukrainian verb гляді́ти (to watch) or гля́нути (to glance), you are using the exact same ancestral root that gave English words like glance, glow, glare, and glisten?

They all trace back to the Proto-Indo-European root ghlend- (to shine, glow).

Notice how in the book, I write the root in bold every time. And I use a color coding system for the sounds in each root, to help you see how the cognates are related, matching sound for sound, how English glance, Ukrainian гляд- and Indo-European ghlend are all related. Between the bolding and coloring, I'm helping you see the root pop out, even if you don't have a trained linguist's eye. It's a system to help even non-linguists see the relations between words and help you build vocabulary, much faster than before and with less pain.

2. How Meanings Shift Across Time

Beginners often wonder how "glowing" turned into "looking." Page 1 walks you through the universal human logic behind this shift:

1. Intransitive state (a state of being): Something shines or glows.

2. Appearance: It develops an outer look or gleam (вигляд — outer appearance).

3. Transitive action (action outwards): You direct your eyes toward that gleam to look or glance at something (погляд — a glance/view).

Seeing this cross-linguistic shift turns an abstract word into a vivid conceptual mental hook that sticks permanently. Both English and Ukrainian have descendant words from Indo-European, that made the same shift.

3. Cross-Slavic Parallels

If you already know another Slavic language (or plan to learn one), the root header maps the family connections instantly: Belarusian гляд-, Polish gląd-, Slovak hľad-, and Czech hled-. If you're also still a little shaky with Cyrillic, seeing what the cousins did with it can help remind you. The г is from a historic g sound (even back to Indo-European) and Polish preserves the g while cousins Slovak and Czech actually moved it closer to an h sound just like Ukrainian. Use them as a crutch to help along sometimes- they are a bridge to the English cognates, and a bridge to where Ukrainian may have gone with it.

4. The Visual Stem Chart

Beneath the etymology text sits the Stem Chart. This is where prefix mechanics come alive. Instead of treating доглядати (to care for), переглядати (to review), and підглядати (to peek) as eight separate dictionary entries separated by hundreds or dozens of pages, the stem chart aligns them visually:

• до- (completely, enough, all the way) + гляд- = to look after / care for ('to watch after thoroughly')

• під- (under) + гляд- = to take a small look / peek under, 'to take a glance underneath'

• пере- (over/again) + гляд-to look over again / review

In one short table, your brain registers how 10+ distinct stems are just simple variations of a single core root.

There's an approximate translation (since it's a stem, after all- something you must add suffixes to, in order to make it a verb, noun, adjective, etc.) and then there's a memory hook in 'quotes'- a hint to help you see how the meaning of the prefix altered the meaning of the root. All the dozen odd prefixes have a small handful of changes they tend to make every time, like до- meaning completely, thoroughly, all the way, під- meaning under, right up to, underneath, and пере- meaning over, again, too much, or (re-) like repeating.

Shortly into the book- after reading the 12 prefix chapters which give you a heads up of the most common changes, and tackling the first dozen or so roots, you'll have a real, intuitive sense, like a native Slavic speaker does, of what these prefixes do to a root. From then on, Ukrainian is like Legos- building blocks interacting in fairly predictable ways.

Mono fonts (letters that take the same space, always) allow the stems to line up nicely, helping you to train to spot the root underlying it all and mentally file the prefix away.

Page 2: The 80/20 Rule for Beginners

1. Don't Panic: The Star System (☆)

When beginners turn to Page 2 and see a full dictionary-style wordlist, it’s easy to feel intimidated. Don't be. This book is specifically built around the 80/20 rule: 20% of the vocabulary drives 80% of daily speech. Throughout the wordlist, you’ll see selected items marked with stars:

• гляда́ч☆ (viewer, spectator)

• ви́гляд☆ (appearance, look)

• перегляда́ти☆ (to look over, watch)

If you’re a beginner, focus exclusively on the starred entries first. They give you immediate, everyday speaking power. The non-starred words are there so the book can stay as a useful resource and reference guide from the very beginning all the way to B2/C1 levels and beyond.

To make it even faster to scan for the top 20%, they also have grey highlighting.

My goal for beginners is NOT that you memorize any lists- but that you pick the first handful of words from each chapter that matter to you. If you know 10% of the words but have internalized the root- you're going to scale the mountain so much quicker and with fewer slips. You can come back to every chapter, bit by bit, and add a few more stems or words to your repertoire each time.

2. Integrated Aspectual Twins

Notice how perfective and imperfective verb pairs are stacked right next to each other alongside directional indicators:

• догляда́ти (imperfective ↔) big stretched out arrows, for UNfinished actions draaa↔agg↔ggging themselves out.

• догля́нути (perfective ↛) an action that leads to a final, FINISHED point ↛, whether past or future- it's perfective.

You learn the concept, the noun, and both verb forms all in one place, keeping your mental lexicon neat and organized.

And again, by using a pleasant layout system, I continue to reinforce the training for your eyes to see the roots- they're still bold and colored like in the Etymology introduction. And in fact- when the English translation contains an English cognate, it will also be bolded and colored, which happens more than once here between Ukrainian гляд- and English glance.

Page 3: Real-World Collocations & Demystifying Verb Stress

1. Natural Collocation Blocks

A vocabulary word is only as useful as your ability to plug it into a real sentence. Page 3 provides instant context blocks showing how these root words function in natural Ukrainian speech:

• на пе́рший по́гляд — at first glance

• з по́гляду... — from the point of view (of)

• роби́ти ви́гляд — to pretend (literally: "to make an appearance")

• перегля́нути докуме́нти — to review documents

Instead of memorizing standalone definitions, you soak up prepositions and word endings... naturally in context.(Зн. Accusative, Р. Genitive, Ор. Instrumental) naturally through context.

2. Master Spoken Stress One Root at a Time

Ukrainian spoken stress can feel wild to beginners. The bottom of Page 3 features a complete Stress Paradigm Table for the three primary stem variations of the root (-глядіти, -глядати, -глянути):

Pronoun	-гляді́ти	-гляда́ти	-гля́нути
я	-гляджу́	-гляда́ю	-гля́ну
ти	-гляди́ш	-гляда́єш	-гля́неш
він/вона	-гляди́ть	-гляда́є	-гля́не

By showing the base conjugation patterns you can clearly see the underlying rhythmic rules.  For every root, there are typically only one to three underlying verbs to learn.

The Takeaway

Learning Ukrainian doesn't require brute-force memorization. By combining deep connections between Ukrainian and other languages, stem charts to show you how the prefixes work, marking of the top vocabulary words to master first, and verb charts, this handbook transforms an overwhelming vocabulary into an intuitive web of connected ideas.

(Pre-orders open Autumn 2026* — join the newsletter to get product updates sent straight to your inbox!)

A Bonus Feature: 100% Purged of "Cursed" Cyrillic Italics

If you’ve ever tried learning Ukrainian from standard textbooks, you know that Cyrillic italics (глядіти, -глядати) look completely different from standard print letters—often confusing learners needlessly.

This handbook is 100% purged of Cyrillic italics. You get clean, highly legible typography throughout, allowing you to focus your mental energy on building vocabulary and mastering grammar rather than decoding handwriting fonts.

*and don't forget, for those learning Polish, the Polish edition comes later in Autumn 2026 as well. The same rules apply- except for Polish orthography. We'll make sure you have a fighting chance to machete-chop your way through the dense jungle of Polish consonants dangling in your face. The same formatting rules and bolding and coloring will help you see the roots better than ever.