Hey y’all! I guess I should introduce myself for those of y’all who don’t know me. I’m joining the Peace Corps on September 19th, and shipping out to Ukraine… really that’s all you need to know, I guess. This blog is mostly for keeping in touch, but also for futue Peace Corps Volunteers. I know I've been relying heavily on current volunteer blogs, and would like to offer the same for other people.

If anybody wants to visit me while I’m in the Ukraine, feel free, and care packages and letters are always welcome. I'll post my address as soon as I get it.

I just received another packet from the Peace Corps, and thought I would copy and paste some interesting facts about what I'm about to do:

Teaching

Peace Corps is the only organization in Ukraine, which provides trained teachers to schools outside of Kiev for an extended period of time.

At the moment more than 170 TEFL PCVs are working mainly in smaller towns and villages of Ukraine.

By the year 2015 Volunteers in collaboration with their counterparts will have taught English to 124,000 secondary school and 19,000 university/college students.

At least 70 per cent of these students will have improved English communication skills and will be able to apply them in formal and non-formal settings. At least 50 per cent of students from rural regions will be admitted to higher educational institutions and attain advanced career goals

Language

The percentage of Ukrainian spoken on the street is about 30% in Kyiv, 50% in Zhytomyr, Vinnytsya, and Khmelnytskyy, 5-10% in Kharkiv and Donetsk, 1-5% in Crimea, 80-95% in Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk (these are just approximations). Rural areas have a higher concentration of Ukrainian speakers; however, the most literary Ukrainian is spoken by educated individuals in the cities.

While educated people usually speak clean literary Russian and/or Ukrainian, large segments of the population - for example, street vendors, laborers, farmers, and many others - speak a mixture of the two languages that leans either towards Russian or Ukrainian. This mix is commonly called "Surzhik".

Language links for the curious:

Ukrainian Language

http://www.ukma.kiev.ua/ua/pub/websites/ufl/index.htm

A free online course for beginners with eleven lessons containing basic vocabulary and quite detailed discussion of grammar and idiom.

http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/4747/words/

A free Conversational Ukrainian Course.

http://depts.washington.edu/llc/olr/ukrainian/UKR_001/index.html

University of Washington Language Learning Center: Taras Shevchenko, Selected Poems from Kobzar

Russian Language

http://www.russnet.org/online.html

Here, we offer various thematic modules for Russian language instruction. These free modules can be used in the classroom, or for independent study.

For a narrative presenting reasons for studying Russian, links to get started, and some general information on the Russian language and the history of its study in the US, go to this page. This website was jointly produced by ACTR and AATSEEL.

http://www.masterrussian.com/

Master Russian: An excellent site, full of resources and links.

http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/ru.htm

Russian tongue twisters.

http://www.du.edu/langlit/russian/grammarx.htm

University of Denver Russian Grammar exercises. The exercises will help you to practice all case endings plus conjugation of verbs.

Yahoo Russian Pages (http://dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Linguistics_and_Human_Languages/Languages/Specific_Languages/Russian/)

Online Translation Tools

http://ukrmova.virtualave.net/dictios/cgi-bin/oluaen.pl

Ukrainian – English translation tool on line. Has links to English – Ukrainian on-line dictionary, Notes on Ukrainian language, and Ukrainian software localization (here you will find some grammar rules, grammar explanations provided are in Ukrainian.).

http://www.rustran.com/

Translation tool for Russian language.

http://lingresua.tripod.com/cgi-bin/onlinedic.pl

English-Ukrainian on-line dictionary.