Ukrainian Proving Easy And Hard 1st Week

About a week in with my 2nd try and a lot of things are sticking that I thought would be impossible. I’ll touch on those points and hope I am right as I am just beginning in this language.

The easier than expected

• Changing endings for nouns to say something is on or in, not super hard, seems pretty intuitive really as the sounds connect the words together.
• Pronunciation is often super easy and I feel like I’ve already got a very good accent in most of what I’ve learned. At times it reminds me of European Portuguese.

The harder than expected

• the combination of endings and beginnings to words changes a lot. To say “also” changes to entirely different sounds depending on what you are doing or what noun you’re working with.
• Pronunciation is SOMETIMES insanely hard and a given word will have effectively tons of syllables with several “kh” “ts” “shch” combos in it at once. I sometimes forget the other words I’m trying to say while I am focusing on a massively long word.

Week 2 strategy

I plan on drilling more vocabulary but the main focus is still getting the new sounds right. This work is the most important at the beginning and if I had to do French over again it would be to focus on pronunciation for the first 6 months with little grammar, little conjugation, and just learn some travel/daily life phrases but say them very very well. I am trying this now with Ukrainian.