The best AI apps to practice speaking Ukrainian

What you need to practice speaking Ukrainian

Ukrainian sits in the middle. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the 43rd hardest for English speakers, at 4,848 effort points. That’s about 1.6 times what Spanish takes (2,941), a bit more than German (4,255), and less than Russian (6,067) or Polish (6,329). It sits right next to Persian (4,856).

The alphabet looks like the hard part. It isn’t, for long. Almost half of those points, 45%, are vocabulary. What makes Ukrainian hard is the words and the endings, at full speed, in a real conversation.

• An alphabet that isn’t Russian’sUkrainian is written in Cyrillic, 33 letters. Some look English but aren’t: В is v, Н is n, Р is r. And if you’ve seen Russian, four letters are new: і is “ee”, ї is “yi” (їжа, food), є is “ye”, and ґ is a g as in “go” (ґудзик, a button), because plain г sounds close to an h: гора, a mountain, is “hora”. И isn’t “ee” either: син, son, sounds close to English “sin”. Most people can sound out words after a week or two.
• Seven cases, one of them for calling peopleNouns change their ending with their job in the sentence. You live у Києві, in Kyiv, go до Києва, to Kyiv, and come з Києва, from Kyiv. The seventh case, the vocative, is for talking to someone: Olena becomes Олено!, Danylo Даниле!, a friend друже!. Forget it and you sound like a textbook. Getting the endings right while you talk takes practice.
• Verbs come in pairsMost verbs have two forms. Я читав книжку: I was reading the book. Я прочитав книжку: I finished it. You pick one every time you talk about the past or the future. And Ukrainian has a one-word future too: читатиму, I’ll be reading.
• Close to Russian, and that’s a trapUkrainian and Russian are related, so if you know some Russian, a lot looks familiar. Then the false friends bite. Неділя is Sunday, but Russian неделя is a week. In Ukrainian a week is тиждень. Питати is to ask. And plenty of everyday words are simply different: thank you is дякую. Your teacher fixes a Russian word that slips in, like any other mistake.
• Lots of Ukrainian you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: Ukrainian videos and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeA language in the middle of our ranking still takes hundreds of hours, and lots of them should be spent talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Ukrainian. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Ukrainian YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories at your level, with the transliteration above every word. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itKnowing a word isn’t the same as using it, with the right ending and the right case. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to Ukrainian? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the alphabet and the basics with a course like Duolingo (free) or Pimsleur, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Ukrainian

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies with the transliteration above every word, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, how to say it, what kind of word it is, and an example with a translation. Its family and its forms are one tap away. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Ukrainian teachers

Two teachers, both from Lviv: Danylo and Olena. Pick the one you like. And when you greet them, use the vocative: Привіт, Даниле! Привіт, Олено!

• 
  Danylo Shevchuk

  Lviv · Ukrainian
• 
  Olena Petrenko

  Lviv · Ukrainian

Input: Ukrainian to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Ukrainian you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now, both with the transliteration above every word. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Ukrainian YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with: the transliteration above the Cyrillic, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Stories written for youRead writes Ukrainian texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Ukrainian word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Ukrainian on Duolingo: 946K learners, it says. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending