The Premise of the Book

When I first started learning Ukrainian, I was overwhelmed by how many words seemed to start with the same syllables. Everything seems to be a пере- this or an об- that, it feels like a huge chunk of the vocabulary must start off this way. And outside the dictionary — out in the real world — Ukrainian words also carry a parade of constantly-changing endings.

Of course, this is just how Ukrainian, and many other languages, work. Verb endings change to tell you who's doing the action (conjugation). Nouns change according to their job in a sentence — the doer, the "doe-ee," and so on (declension). In practical terms, this means the last syllable — sometimes even the last two — is often just grammatical ‘fluff’, repeated over and over across totally unrelated words.

And the first parts, those are prefixes. English has prefixes, too, but we don't use them nearly as much as Ukrainian does, to actively create new vocabulary. They're about as powerful and important as English prepositions, actually. Like to speak out, to speak up, to speak over. These changing prepositions radically change the meaning of the root speak, yet they're obviously all of the same root. Ukrainian does the same but with prefixes fused on the front of the word. As if English said outspeak, or upspeak or overspeak. It's why Ukrainian dictionaries have huge sections of words with the same starting components.

What's next is going to help explain why most Ukrainian learners struggle so much, and so long, to get past a certain hurdle in building vocabulary.

There's a psychological principle called the Serial Position Effect, which suggests that we best remember the beginnings and endings of things — phone numbers, sentences, phrases, words, stories and more. Something about how we're wired.

This means a learner of Ukrainian ends up focusing on exactly all the wrong parts of a word when trying to build vocabulary. Vocabulary has to be built from the root. You should absolutely still learn the verb and noun endings — but they're often a distraction from acquiring vocabulary. Endings are important but they’re not vocabulary. Learning endings is genuinely a separate task. (More on this at another time)

Roots are the building blocks of meaning, and in Ukrainian they're nestled between so much material on the left and right. Bring in the Serial Position Effect, and it's a disaster for anyone trying to learn Ukrainian by rote memorization.

Let's look at some examples.

You hear someone say обходили and обкладали. Both start with the same syllable (об-) and both end, more or less, the same way (-или, -али). Unfortunately, that's exactly what you're most likely to notice and remember. Asked to repeat what you heard, you might report back: "I dunno... it started with an ob- kind of thing, something, something, then -al... something?"

And yet the most meaningful part of each word is the nugget in the middle —  the root ход-, meaning to go (on foot), to walk, and the клад-, meaning to place, to put. We’ll call these roots — shorthand for root words.

Here you see how I lay out the stems for you. A stem is a prefix (or multiple prefixes) plus a root. See how a stem has its own meanings. The color highlighting is to draw your attention to the prefix- and to the rough meaning it conveys, in quotes 'like this.' 

Here's the stems for клад- the same deal. The prefixes cause a change of meaning to the root that will soon become somewhat guessable for you. The book will also help give you a head start and learn the basics of the prefixes, too.

What's a little crazy — and this is an understatement — is that nearly 90% of native Ukrainian vocabulary reuses the same top 500 roots. How do I know? I did the math. Ninety percent of key vocabulary — thousands and thousands of unique individual words — are really just remixes of about a dozen prefixes, 500 roots, and all those grammatical endings. Just above you see how one root, modified by a dozen prefixes, creates a dozen stems. And each stem, then, may have a half dozen words from it- noun forms, verb forms, adjectives and so forth.

If you try to learn these by rote memorization- cramming one after another, the Serial Position Effect and other things will make it a very, very long climb indeed. However- breaking your task down to 500 roots, a dozen+ prefixes, is going to completely change the outlook on how you do this.

The books I'm publishing take on Ukrainian by these roots, directly. I'm publishing the top 200 roots first — that's where you'll get familiar with the method and make the fastest gains. The top 200, in fact, already does a huge amount of the work. You'll build your vocabulary in a genuinely systematic way, maybe for the first time.

After the stems are laid out for you, all of the vocabulary of that root and its stems are laid out as well. To help draw your attention to the root, it's placed in the same spot on the column every time, and you can see how the prefixes branch to the left, and the various grammatical endings branch to the right.

Furthermore, each chapter starts out with a page dedicated to helping you memorize the root itself, by analyzing its origins (etymology). The reason I went with this was twofold. First, because I was often coming up with memory tricks that used cognates anyway. As I tried to learn клад- and remembered that it was about putting something on like cladding or clothing, I was in fact bringing up distant relatives of the root.

Ukrainian and English are cousins on the great tree of Indo-European languages. This huge family are the descendants of an ancient language that scholars have carefully reconstructed from evidence from all the daughter languages. It is called Indo-European and is responsible for most of the languages of Europe (not counting outliers like Basque, Finnish, and Hungarian) and even stretches through the Middle East and South Asia, as languages and language families like Kurdish, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and many others. (See here for more intro to this if it's new to you)

The decision of my book was that if half of your best memory tricks are going to echo actual cousin-words anyway, why not lean into it. So, we explore the connections of Ukrainian and English, and Ukrainian with other members of Indo-European you may know or may get a helpful connection with. And when there isn't a connection, we come up with some more creative memory aid anyways.

Here's a sample of the etymology page, where I show the relation between the root behind Ukrainian могти and могутний, and English may and mighty. I generously use colored letters to help you see the correspondences between the words.

If you're excited by this new method, sign up to our emails to get notifications of the release of products. I plan to have Volume I of Ukrainian By The Roots available for sale as a PDF by September 2026. Companion materials will be added- study guides and the like, and for those interested in learning Polish, Slovak, and Czech, their editions will be coming soon as well. I hope to see this method revolutionize how non-Slavic speakers learn Slavic languages.