Visiting Ukraine: Notes
The photographs in the slide show in this section are accompanied by nouns denoting buildings or places, and their locations (A1 level). As well as learning how to say, for example, “market”, “church”, “museum”, “town”, “country” etc., you can practise reading the names of various cities and regions of Ukraine, some of which you will have met in the “About Ukraine” section. It is also useful to learn how to write (transliterate) Ukrainian place and geographical names in English, for example Львів – Lviv, Київ - Kyiv etc. You can find a set of rules for doing this in Read Ukrainian! - Transliteration.
Using the slide show to teach/learn the locative case
You have probably noticed, by now, that in Ukrainian the endings of words change, depending on their function in the sentence (the grammatical term for this is “case”). For example, if you want to say where something is, you have to give the noun a special ending, most often the letter «і» e.g. Лондон – London, в Лондоні – in London. The endings of nouns are important as in Ukrainian the word order is flexible. To read more about this go to Read Ukrainian! - Unit 5
Once you have learned the names for the various places on the slides (see list below) you can say where they are, that is, you can start using the locative case in Ukrainian:
- if the place name ends in «а» (i.e. it’s probably a feminine noun), take the «а» off the ending and add «і» e.g. Одеса - в Одесі (other names like this: Україна, Балаклава, Ялта, Полтава, Львівщина);
- if the place name ends in a consonant (i.e. it’s a masculine noun), all you have to do, usually, is to add «і» e.g. Житомир – у Житомирі (other names like this: Херсон, Кіровоград, Ужгород);
- additionally, in some masculine place names (those ending in –ів or –їв), there is a change in the vowel of the stem e.g. Львів – у Львові, Харків – у Харкові, Київ – у Києві;
- in a third type of noun (usually masculine nouns ending in -ськ or –цьк), the locative is formed by adding the ending «у» e.g. Івано-Франківськ - в Івано-Франківську (other names like this: Дніпропетровськ, Донецьк, Луцьк, Луганськ); this rule also applies to a number of short words, including Крим – у Криму;
- some place names are plural, so they take a plural ending in the locative case e.g. Чернівці – у Чернівцях (another name like this: Карпати – у Карпатах).
There is one final thing you need to know before you can make up simple sentences of the type «Сходи в Одесі» (The steps are in Odesa). In this sentence there does not appear to be a verb. This is because the verb “to be” is normally omitted in the present tense. You can read more about this in Read Ukrainian! - Page 4.2