Welcome to the Blog- My Origin Story with Slavic languages

Welcome to the Blog

I figure the first entry should be a bit about myself and my experience learning Slavic languages. I was writing the About page and realized the story was getting long — better to save the story for here.

I first started learning Ukrainian in a very non-committal way over a decade ago, when I had some Ukrainian tutoring students. I didn't get far, since it was just a hobby, but I picked up a basic sense of the alphabet (approximately Chapters 1, and maybe 2, of one of the conventional self-learning resources) and finished about two hours of Pimsleur — which meant I could say "I don't understand Ukrainian," but with a flawless accent.

I love Pimsleur, but vocabulary-building on it is sllloooowwww sometimes.

I didn't seriously pick Ukrainian back up until late February 2022, more or less when putin's promised "three-day operation" had already stretched into day four. I was glued to the news, and my reasoning evolved in real time along with the invasion. First it was, "I'd better learn Ukrainian, because there are going to be millions of refugees in the US" — this was back when the going assumption was that Ukraine would fall and half the country would flee. Then it shifted to, "I'd better learn Ukrainian, because I want to go help." World Central Kitchen's dispatches, and the flood of official and improvised responses piling up at the Polish border, pulled at me specifically. I wanted to get there and help with what was, by comparison, a smaller — though still enormous — refugee crisis. My mental model kept shrinking and sharpening: from bracing for tens of millions displaced by a collapsing state, to preparing to help several million, to quietly hoping for the day the skies would clear enough for them to go home.

I spent the following months printing vocabulary lists off the internet, buying more grammar books than any hobbyist reasonably needs, and excavating old book piles for the Ukrainian textbooks I'd mothballed a decade earlier. I also spent months chasing false trails on where or how to actually volunteer, all while still running my garlic farm and normal life back in the US. Before I could just up and move my life to Europe, I had a lot to close out — a business built over ten years doesn't wind down on a whim.

Fast-forward: I arrived in Poland in November 2022 to volunteer with the refugee response. I've always had a stubborn insistence on learning at least a few words of any country I pass through, but I didn't even know Poland was the country until about two weeks before I left. I'd applied to a volunteer organization, All Hands and Hearts, but I'd also been eyeing options in Romania and elsewhere, so I hadn't committed to learning anything besides Ukrainian.

Then the yes came through, and with it, a crash course in Polish — arguably a rougher climb than Ukrainian, despite trading Cyrillic for a “familiar alphabet”; Polish just stacks its consonants without mercy. I struggled early on, but I got myself functional, and eventually confident enough to order food at a bar mleczny — a milk bar, the communist-era cafeteria holdovers that still run on hand-written paper menus and zero patience for hesitation. As far as I'm concerned, confidently ordering a full meal at a bar mleczny without without holding up the line should be the final boss of the Polish citizenship test.

That whiplash between languages ended up helping my Ukrainian immensely. I kept recognizing cognates — related words — running in both directions between the two, each one reinforcing the other. I was in Poland with All Hands and Hearts, an organization that started out doing natural disaster relief — clearing storm debris, pouring concrete for schools — and had, for the first time in its history, walked into a disaster that was man-made and still ongoing. Much of my actual project work was construction and renovation for Polish-led aid organizations: building shelving, expanding kitchens, adding accessible bathrooms into spaces that were never built for the volume of people now leaning on them.

Working alongside enigmatic Polish contractors who opened up when I, very Americanly, over-used lots of hellos and goodbyes, pleases and thanks, finding Ukrainian residents much more at ease when you could tell them how soon the new kitchen would be done, or when the second bathroom would be finished, as people had to wait hours for dozens of residents to go through one. And the times when I was drafted by my site coordinator to write the trilingual ‘Wet Paint’ signs in Radymno. There are so many memories in southeast Poland I had, working at that time.

The program eventually moved to Krakow, and one site I came back to again and again was a warehouse run by a group called Dobro Zawsze Wraca — "Good Always Returns" — sorting and shipping aid into Ukraine while also supplying Ukrainians who had fled to Kraków. Difficult moments like seeing a fellow volunteer break down and cry while folding a toddler’s sweater. Other moments where I had my own times where I had to turn around and compose myself, like seeing the strollers and boxes of diapers stacked in the halls of Przemysl Train Station while women of the Polish National Guard handed out tampons.

It was a hell of a time and you don’t really know how much it has affected you until you dig it up.

Poland was an important stepping-point for my decision to help, because I slowly built the courage to move further. I had gone from a nervous traveller, only a one-time backpacking trip to Europe over a decade before, to being the volunteer that fellow volunteers called for when they needed to call the taxi agency. In rural Poland, where Bolt and Uber simply don't reach, and with our bilingual staff over-taxed, I took my 3-month old Polish and normal social anxiety (I actually hate phone calls in English, much less Polish) and called up old guys who were monolingual or would mysteriously attempt to use German on me if I didn’t get things right.

Ordering at delis and pharmacies where English usage was close to zero. Explaining yourself, badly and then less badly, to a bus driver. In those times I found a real charm in Poland that only unlocked once I actually tried to speak it. Polish became a second love, right alongside Ukrainian.

Fast-forward again. I found an opportunity to volunteer directly in Ukraine and took it. I was nervous leading up to the move — nervous in the specific way that comes from knowing you can't fully predict what you're walking into. I've since come around to a rule I picked up from watching other volunteers: you consistently fail to predict how useful you'll turn out to be on a given project, so at some point you stop waiting for certainty and just move, on faith, trusting it'll work out. It did. I haven't regretted the decision since. I now live in western Ukraine, still volunteering, teaching and tutoring English, and thoroughly, permanently in love with Ukrainian.

The products I put out here are passion projects- the desire to help reveal Slavic languages to fellow non-Slavs who find their lives entwined in these charming, captivating places.