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The english and Ukrainian languages differ in many aspects that create problems for learners in Ukraine, such as:
absence of articles in Ukrainian. So students need to understand usage of a, an, and the;
word order in a sentence: In english there is the strict word order in a statement and in Ukrainian – vice versa;
Ukrainian has 7 cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative) whereas english-only nominative one, other cases are expressed with the help of prepositions: genitive-of, dative-by);
in comparison with punctuation of the Ukrainian language, learners should pay attention to the presence of a comma: in the simple sentences with 3 or more homogeneous parts (before “and”); after the date before the year, and the absence of a comma in the complex sentences: subject, predicate, and object clauses; attribute clauses (if they give essential information), and in adverbial clauses, if they are after the principal clause;
false friends of a translator: though the presence of international words makes easier understanding of the english language, some pairs of words have similar spelling and (or) pronunciation (homonyms, homographs, homophones), but different meanings, e.g. morale is competitive spirit, not morality [the article is read in Wikipedia] ;
In Ukrainian words are read, as they are written and in english spelling does not correspond pronunciation (because the last one changed with time and the first one almost did not and because of many borrowings from other languages), so Ukrainian learners need to know rules of reading and in addition the IPA to read english words properly;
as for pronunciation Ukrainians have to train: the glottal sound [h] (with aspiration), [g] - as some Ukrainian learners pronounce it like the glottal, not
velar sound, and dental [T[, [D] (Phonetic TM), especially [s] in combination with [T], [D] by tongue twisters (of course, learners need to know these sounds to be pronounced correctly), e.g. The seething sea ceaseth; thus the seething sea sufficeth us;
listening (e.g. tapes, video) and understanding native speakers, because of
the rapid speech and the indistinct articulation. Ukrainians, communicating alive with native speakers (coming into Ukraine) and through the Internet (Skype, on-line games), traveling (studying, working) abroad, have more possibilities to improve english practicing it (and shortening the silent period) and accordingly less problems in studying it;
necessity to distinguish regular and irregular verbs (in english) and furthermore, to know all forms of last ones;
learners need to distinguish shades of meanings of english modal verbs;
Ukrainian learners must not forget to apply auxiliary verbs for making inter-rogative and negative sentences (in english) and to know the structure of these sentences (e.g. that “not” goes with an auxiliary verb);
in the Ukrainian language a sentence can have many negatives and in the english language-only one;
when Ukrainian learners are asked to name tenses in english, they sometimes answer: Past, Future and Present, not Indefinite, Continuous and Perfect. That is the difference in tenses between these languages. So, for learners it's difficult to understand Present Perfect (as it connects past and present through the result, that is absent in Ukrainian) and it's interesting to know about the gerund (as it's also absent in Ukrainian).
Summing it up, Ukrainian teachers of the english language, knowing these differences between the languages pay attention of learners to them and do a lot of activities, using not grammar-translation method, which is not effective and suitable for Ukrainian learners, but ESA approach for students to be aware, understand and remember them.
