About

Hi, I'm Daren — an English language teacher who moved to Ukraine in 2023, after volunteering in Poland. As I worked to learn Ukrainian, then Polish, then Ukrainian again, I kept running into the same wall. The materials I wanted simply didn't exist.

The vision I had for how Slavic vocabulary could be taught was nowhere on the market. So in 2025 I set about a large research project — cataloguing the most important core roots of Slavic words and building study materials around them. At first I was doing it for myself, and then I realized, if I adapted my own materials for a wider audience, I would probably have something on my hands that could revolutionize Slavic-language-learning.

What I found is that all Slavic languages share a remarkable number of roots, and that those roots, modified by prefixes and suffixes, make up the beating heart of each language's vocabulary. The top 200 roots account for nearly 65% of the core native vocabulary of any Slavic language. The next 300 get you to nearly 90%.

I'm an English language teacher by training and an amateur polyglot and linguist by inclination. This project brings those two things together- and my passion to see Slavic languages become accessible.

Translations into Spanish, Portuguese,  and other languages are already underway (for learning Ukrainian), and more products are coming- including Polish, Slovak and Czech. Subscribe to the blog to follow along, or write to me directly at daren@learnbytheroots.com."