Petro Jacyk competition winners received awards
Twentynine schoolchildren and fifteen college students of Kyiv have won the third stage of the Fourth Petro Jacyk International Ukrainian Language Competition.
Natalia Ovsiychuk, a first-year undergraduate at the Industrial-Economic College of National Aeronautical University, had never expected to be among the winners. She fulfilled all the creative tasks with pleasure, and the jury especially distinguished her composition on the beauty of her mother tongue. “For some reason,” says Natalia, “my peers think it better to speak Russian, while the older generation — parents, relatives, acquaintances — prefer Ukrainian. I am not ashamed to speak Ukrainian in any environment. My friends are always pleased to hear me, they are glad that I won the Jacyk competition, but they still feel ill at ease to switch to Ukrainian. It hurts me that they are reluctant to do so. Nobody can force one to speak his native language, one can only do this by oneself.”
Anton Lytvyn (a ninth-grader at the Troyeshchyna Gymnasium), who is trying his luck in this competition for the fourth time, won a second-degree citation, his first city-level award. “Every year I join the competition to test my strength, for I’ve set a goal to have a good command of Ukrainian. I worked really hard for the competition. Earlier, I found it difficult to write compositions, so I began to read Ukrainian fiction. I would choose books on our country’s historical past because this is the main subject for me. I did not expect this would yield a result like this and I would be a winner.” Anton believes his peers speak mostly Russian because they have done so in their families since childhood and now it is difficult to overcome the habit.
He is convinced that if a small child learns and gets used to speaking Ukrainian in he family, he/she will find it easy to use the language in any situation.
Olena Hnuchva (an eleventh-grader at the Ukrainian Liberal Arts Lyceum of Kyiv’s Taras Shevchenko National University) comes from a Russian-speaking family. The girl’s mother came to Ukraine from Belarus and father from Russia. It is lyceum teachers who helped Olena learn and love the Ukrainian language. She always wants to lead in everything and made quite an effort to prepare for the competition.
As a result, she earned a first-degree citation. Olena thinks that if you want to have a really good command of a language, you should concentrate on reading fiction rather than scholarly literature. The composition she presented was on further prospects of the Ukrainian language.
Halyna Yatsevska, a teacher at School No. 20 (her pupils were also among the winners), notes that Russian-speaking families have been more respectful of the Ukrainian language recently. When she came to this school twenty years ago, nine out of the thirteen first- grade classes were Russian-speaking, while now all classes use Ukrainian as the medium of instruction.
Liudmyla Dvoretska, who teaches at the Leader Lyceum, believes this competition is important for popularizing and developing the Ukrainian language in that it differs from school Olympiads in terms of its criteria for selecting winners. Emphasis is put not on theory but on the actual command, ability to feel all the meanings of a word, what specialists call good feeling of the language. “If a child does not speak Ukrainian in his off-school hours, he will not meet the competition’s requirements,” Ms. Dvoretska says. The jury was presided over by Ivan Yushchuk, head of the Department of Slavic Languages and Philology of Kyiv International University, a teacher for forty years. Mr. Yushchuk told The Day that almost every work of the competitors deserved the top prize. “The language of children is becoming more and more rich and poetic, the word stock has increased in the past few years, schoolchildren have practically mastered the artistic instruments of the Ukrainian language, and they can already use all kinds of syntactic structures today. The competitors made almost no spelling mistakes, although there were quite a lot of errors in punctuation. On the whole, our children have a very decent command of the language; they know how to speak well and correctly. I wish they were not embarrassed to take this knowledge out into the street and use the language in everyday life. Young people are still unaware that they doom themselves to provincialism by spurning the mother tongue. This is a remnant of the Soviet peri od.”
