Once More, With Feeling
After two years and nine months of learning Ukrainian, something glorious and unprecedented has happened. My obsession-prone, attention-span-of-a-goldfish brain has finally hyperfixated on something useful: the Ukrainian language. My brain has never been built for consistency. I can count on one hand the things I have stuck with long enough to get good at them. I either have an intrinsic, interest-based motivation that carries me for years, or I am utterly indifferent.
My motivation for learning Ukrainian was indirect. It came from a place of logic and principle. I believe that if you are researching a group of people that you do not belong to, learning their language is the bare minimum. I am committed to my PhD research; therefore, I am committed to learning Ukrainian. That said, it felt like pulling teeth for the first two years and eight months. Over the past few weeks, my relationship to my research has changed significantly, and my relationship to the Ukrainian language has changed with it. When you only interact with a language in a classroom setting, speaking the language will inevitably feel like trying to pass a test. At best, you memorise the script, but you don’t get a feel for the language. Combine that with perfectionistic tendencies and a predisposition to procrastination, and it’s a miracle I can speak Ukrainian at all.
Every time I had spoken Ukrainian outside of the classroom, it was either to talk about my research, or to order coffee in a Ukrainian café. I was either worrying about coming across as professional, or trying to remember the correct conjugation for oat milk. Either way, I was trying to pass a test.
When the Ukrainian language comes alive to me, I am in a pottery studio in East London in late June. Half-soaked from the rain, drinking green tea and staring directly into a pair of blue-grey eyes. She is telling me something about the Ukraine Institute’s events, and I am realising just how little Ukrainian I can understand. The only word I can muster is «Боже» (“oh god”) before switching back to English. If it is a test, I am definitely failing, but it doesn’t feel like a test. For the first time, I am listening to someone speak Ukrainian, and feeling at ease. I don’t have the vocabulary, I don’t have the language comprehension skills, I can only really nod and say «так» instead of contributing to the conversation, but I don’t feel like I’m taking an exam.
I feel safe in my imperfection, and it unlocks a curiosity in me. The next day I send a voice message in Ukrainian, and my brain is a dark void. My visual mind has switched off, and I finally get it. The reason Ukrainian never clicked for me is that all I have done is memorise words, but not the feelings and images attached to them. I talk about a meeting with my PhD supervisor, and I don’t picture my supervisor. If there is an image in my mind at all, it’s of a classroom and my former Ukrainian teacher. I think of where I learned the word, not its meaning. Of course my mind is empty. Of course searching for Ukrainian vocabulary feels like fumbling around in the dark.
I have only ever spoken Ukrainian to get it right. To be a good student, to have correct grammar and the right vocabulary. I never spoke Ukrainian to communicate. I never used the language the way I use English. As a writer, language is everything to me. I thought that meant language in general, not English specifically. As a native English speaker, I have rarely had to consider the relationship between my feelings and the language I verbalise them in. My feelings are my feelings; they belong to my body. Yet I only know how to feel in English. For the first time, I begin to wonder what it would feel like to have a friendship in a foreign language, or to fall in love. Would «я тебе кохаю» ever hold the same emotional depth for me as “I love you”? Would I always feel like a part of me was lost in translation?
I never felt emotions in Ukrainian, yet that void held important space for me.
A few months ago, I went to this seminar about the psychology of bilingualism, and the speaker shared an anecdote about a bilingual Korean-Canadian man who was trying to decide whether to break up with his girlfriend. When he thought about it in Korean, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Yet when he considered it in English, he felt more emotional distance from the language, and as able to admit to himself that he wanted to end the relationship. A few weeks later, I found myself in a similar position. I was grappling with the realisation that I was a lesbian, and I couldn’t admit it to myself, I couldn’t say the word. If I said the word, life as I knew it was over. Saying the word meant ending my relationship, finding somewhere else to live, starting my life over at 27. So I thought of the Korean-Canadian man, and I turned to Ukrainian. I wrote «я лесбійка я лесбійка я лесбійка» over and over in my diary. I repeated it to myself in the mirror. I didn’t necessarily feel anything, besides the weight of premonition thudding in my chest, but Ukrainian gave me words where English failed me.
Ukrainian doesn’t feel like a void to me now. I learned to understand what actually motivates me, and it isn’t perfection. I’m motivated by human connection, I’m motivated by art and creativity, I’m motivated by feelings. I love academia, I am so passionate about my research. But learning a language because I “should” learn it is enough to make me take three years of classes, it’s enough to make me begrudgingly practice. It is enough to squeeze the bare minimum out of me, but it’s not enough to make me fall in love with the language. Falling in love with Ukrainian came from listening to the same songs on repeat for two weeks until I understood their meaning. It came from channelling my overwhelming desire to talk into talking in Ukrainian. Maybe I’m not where I should be after three years of learning a language. But each time I start a voice message with two sentences of Ukrainian, I am doing more than I was a month ago, I am letting the language be lived in instead of relegating its role in my life to a purely academic one.
Understanding Ukrainian doesn’t come from memorising tables of case endings. It comes in quiet moments. Standing on the tube platform with Ukrainian music playing in my headphones, and realising the grammar of the sentence means “are you alive?” and not “you live”. Singing in the shower and realising I’ve memorised the entire chorus of badactress’ wlw.ua without even realising. My biggest linguistic win happened a couple of days ago, once again in a tube station. I was listening to Tember Blanche’s Та Сама and I felt the lyrics of the song, felt this moment of emotion that wasn’t tied to the tone of the music, but the words themselves. For the first time, I felt emotions in Ukrainian, realised I have a favourite song in Ukrainian. Perhaps everything in life, for me, comes down to people and words and art. Perhaps those are the only motivations I know.
I’ve often heard that people have different personalities in different languages. I never developed a personality in Ukrainian, because I was a little robot memorising words without any emotion. I think I’m developing a personality now. I have retained parts of my English personality, namely my sense of humour, but my limited Ukrainian vocabulary forces me to be direct. To say what I mean instead of burying it in layers of inference. Ukrainian doesn’t have the same implications, the same baggage that English does for me. The words that flow easily into my mind in Ukrainian are sweet – compliments and appreciation. Things I find harder to say in English because I know how people will read into them. It feels easier to be affectionate in Ukrainian because words are just words. There is an obvious flaw in this logic: if I am speaking Ukrainian, I am talking to a native Ukrainian speaker. The words that are light as a feather to me probably have a tonne of implications to them. Perhaps the real test of my ability to feel emotions in Ukrainian will be when I start overthinking everything I say in Ukrainian the way I do in English, when the words begin to weigh me down with their power and their inadequacy.
Do our learned behaviours change when we switch to a different language? Will I be less anxious in Ukrainian, less of a chatterbox, less awkward? And why is my first thought that I should be less? Perhaps there are parts of me that will come alive in Ukrainian in a way they never could in English. Perhaps in Ukrainian I get to be forward, get to be open and kind without immediately anticipating rejection.
Learning Ukrainian felt like a purely academic pursuit for so long. I never though this was a language I needed to embody; a language I needed to feel emotions in outside of my research. But every emotion I have felt in Ukrainian so far has been expansive. The space to admit to myself who I am, when my native language failed me. The euphoria of understanding and relating to a song in a foreign tongue. The relief of feeling at ease in someone’s company, of being able to switch back and forth between languages without perfectionism rearing its head. The more I listen to Ukrainian music, make Ukrainian friends, read Ukrainian Instagram posts about astrology, the more this language becomes a world I inhabit instead of a duty to fulfil.