Ok, here’s the thing.. I often use tools like chatGPT or Google Translate during this learning journey. And they have their strong points, no doubt about it. But, when I really want to be sure, or as sure as can be, I go somewhere else. Glosbe is an online dictionary that translates between a large number of languages, not just English and Ukrainian. And, whenever I want to get a good grasp of a word, that is where I go.
For example, in yesterdays post, and the previous on the same theme, I talked about how different nouns change depending on their roles in a sentence. This is one of those occasions where using glosbe was way more preferable to some of the other tools. One of the words I was using in that text was будинок (building, budýnok). I did a search for “building”, and Glosbe gives some alternatives, of which будинок was the first. It often features recordings (not computer voices) pronouncing the word, it has sample sentences, and it has tables of the different forms of the word.
The table above is a screenshot from glosbe. And while the understanding of the different forms can be tricky sometimes, when we see a word like this, it does get a lot easier constructing a sentence. If I speak about many houses, I know to use будинки, or if I am painting the house, I am painting my будинок and if I use the house for something, I am using the будинком.
It’s still a lot of things to learn and remember, but seeing it like thismakes it easier to get a sense of how things are structured