Description
The English edition. For English speakers learning Ukrainian.
Since the twenty-fourth of February 2022, people have stood on a corner in Kamloops every Saturday at three. Nobody organises it and nobody reminds anybody. They just come. This book grew out of that habit.
Thirty-six days on the roads of Vancouver Island. Thirty-five songs, one for each year of Ukraine’s independence, and a thirty-sixth day for the year that has not finished yet.
Every day has the same parts, so the book is a habit rather than a syllabus:
- a place on the island, photographed on the day
- the song of that year, and what was happening in Ukraine when it was written
- a point of grammar that the song itself teaches
- a point of pronunciation
- three sentences to learn by heart, a hundred and eight over the book
- an English song paired with the Ukrainian one, and why the two argue with each other
- what the author learned that day, and from whom
- the land, naming the nation whose territory the day was spent on
Every Ukrainian word is given twice, in Cyrillic and in Latin letters, so you can say it before you can read it. You are never sent to a glossary at the back.
Two playlists come with the book. All thirty-six Ukrainian songs in year order, and all thirty-six English pairs, both gathered so you can listen while you read. The addresses are printed inside, and the lists are living: when a new year is added, its song joins them.
Who it is for
Canadians who lost Ukrainian. Your grandmother spoke it, you do not, and you think it is too late. It is not, and you are not alone: more than a million people in Canada write Ukrainian on the census. Start at day one, with the story rather than the grammar. What you get is a language, a history, and a reason to phone someone in your family.
Canadians who want to understand Ukraine. You have seen the news and stood at a rally and would like more than headlines. Thirty-five years, one a day, each through a song people actually sing, and it does not simplify. You will learn that the first line of the Ukrainian anthem was borrowed from the Polish one, that the cheeriest song sung at weddings is about exile, and that the Crimean Tatars are an Indigenous people of Ukraine and Ukrainians are not. What you get is a country, not a position.
Chapter eighteen deliberately settles nothing. Four people in it disagree and none of them is wrong.
The English pairs
Each Ukrainian song has an English one beside it, chosen because the two argue. Woody Guthrie could not call his song what he meant, so it went out as God Blessed America for Me with two verses quietly dropped; Taras Petrynenko could not call his «Україна» by its name either, so it went out on the radio in 1987 under its first line. The most famous song about West Virginia was written by two people who had never been there. The most Irish song in the world was written by an English lawyer in Bath who had never been to Ireland. That is where the two languages actually meet.
The companion volume
Суботи о третій · Пісня на кожен рік is the same journey written for Ukrainian speakers learning English. If you are a family, take both: the same day, the same song, the same evening, and the language runs in both directions at one table.
Price
$12.99 CAD, the same as every DROKACADEMY textbook whatever its length, so nobody chooses a book by its thickness. The author takes nothing. Net proceeds go to the Love Care Share Scholarship Fund at Thompson Rivers University.
It is free to a lot of people, and there is one coupon for all of them. If you have given to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, if you are a student or a programme taking the book into a course, if you cannot afford it right now, or if you have helped make the book better in any way, write to sasha@drokacademy.ca and I will send you the code. You do not need to explain anything, and nothing will be asked. The person who gave knows they gave.
First edition, August 2026
This is a first edition and it says so. The author has read it through himself and corrected what he could see, and is still correcting. Corrections, better song pairs and suggestions for the next edition are wanted, and everyone who helps is named in it: sasha@drokacademy.ca
Dr Oleksandr (Sasha) Kondrashov · DROKACADEMY · Love. Care. Share.
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