Ukrainian Reading Passages Built for Your Lessons

Key facts about the Ukrainian language

Speakers

About 32 million people speak Ukrainian as a first language and about 7 million as a second language (2023).¹

Did you know?

Unlike Russian, Ukrainian uses a vocative case to address people, as a seventh case: Олена becomes Олено! when you call her.²

The main challenge

Mobile stress: the stress can move between different forms of the same word, so it has to be learned along with the endings.¹

CEFR exams

• State exams in Ukrainian (National Commission on State Language Standards), under its 2024 standard "Ukrainian as a Foreign Language", levels A1 to C2

Where students struggle

• Learners who know Russian need to watch the letters: Ukrainian has і, ї, є and ґ, which Russian lacks, and its и stands for a different sound from Russian и.¹

Teaching notes

• Use the vocative in beginner dialogues from the start, for example Олено! from Олена: it is how Ukrainians address each other, and it follows regular patterns such as -а becoming -о.²

Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_grammar

About the Ukrainian language

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_alphabet
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_grammar
4. https://mova.gov.ua/

Ukrainian reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR)

This column uses plain CEFR levels to describe reading difficulty. Ukraine's National Commission on State Language Standards approved its own standard for Ukrainian as a foreign language, with levels A1 to C2, in 2024; the column does not claim equivalence with that standard or with any certificate.

Reference corpora

Ukrainian has both a very large reference corpus and a small balanced one.^1,2

• GRAC: The General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (ГРАК) holds about 2 billion tokens in version 19, with texts up to 2025: more than 150,000 texts by about 35,000 authors, written from 1816 onward, with region tags and morphological annotation.¹
• BRUK: Starko and Rysin's Brown Corpus of Ukrainian (БрУК) is a one-million-word sample of edited written Ukrainian from 2010 to 2020, balanced across nine categories on the model of the original Brown corpus.²
• Standard register: Stichos writes standard literary Ukrainian (літературна мова) at every level and avoids dialect words and mixed Ukrainian–Russian speech (суржик).

1. https://uacorpus.org/
2. https://aclanthology.org/2023.unlp-1.11/

Readability design principles

Ukrainian has no well-established readability formula of its own.¹

• Existing formulas tested: Prykhodchenko and Prykhodchenko (2025) built UkrTB, a corpus of texts sorted by reader age, and tested Flesch, Flesch–Kincaid and Polish and Russian formulas on it. Some correlated partly with the expected levels and others were inconsistent, and they conclude Ukrainian needs its own metric.¹
• Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits rather than a single readability score.

1. https://aclanthology.org/2025.quasy-1.4/

Script & grammar scaffolding

• Tenses: A0 uses only the present tense. A1 adds the past tense of both aspects and the compound future with буду + infinitive. A2 opens the perfective future, the conditional with б/би and reflexive verbs in -ся. The pluperfect (давноминулий час) waits until C1.
• Participles: Adjectival participles (дієприкметники) arrive at B1, and adverbial participle clauses (дієприслівникові звороти) at B2. Below that, the same ideas are expressed with ordinary clauses.
• Clauses: A0 is a single main clause in subject–verb–object order. A1 links clauses with simple conjunctions, and A2 adds reason and condition clauses and relative clauses with який.
• Address: Strangers, superiors and adult acquaintances are addressed with formal Ви, children and close relations with ти. Early levels keep subject pronouns explicit, although Ukrainian often drops them.

Related academic & framework resources

• National Commission on State Language Standards: The state body that sets standards for Ukrainian and runs state-language proficiency exams for citizenship and public office.
• Ukrainian as a Foreign Language. Levels A1–C2: The commission's standard for Ukrainian as a foreign language, approved by decision No. 279 of 29 August 2024.
• GRAC: General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian: The searchable corpus, a volunteer project hosted at the University of Jena.
• Creating a POS Gold Standard Corpus of Modern Ukrainian: The UNLP 2023 paper by Vasyl Starko and Andriy Rysin describing BRUK.
• Application of Existing Readability Methods to the Ukrainian Language: The 2025 study by Serhii and Oksana Prykhodchenko.

Frequently Asked Questions

What can I test on this page right now?

You can try a free A0 or A1 story generated live in the reader above, complete with tap-to-translate vocabulary and line-by-line translations. You can also join the Reading List to receive 3 free sample stories as a PDF without creating an account.

Which levels will be available when Educator Studio launches?

At launch, Educator Studio will cover every level from A0 through B2. You will be able to select any topic and turn specific tenses on or off so the text stays strictly within the grammar your class has studied.

How do I share reading passages with my students at launch?

At launch, you can share any story you generate by sending a link to your students, with no limit on how many share links you create. Your students open the link directly in their browser without making an account, though they can choose to create a free account if they want to save their words and stories.

Can my students listen to the stories they read?

At launch, students reading a shared story can tap any word to hear it pronounced using a standard computer voice. If you add the Premium Audio add-on at launch, students get natural-sounding voices for word pronunciation, full story narration with distinct voices for different speakers, and MP3 audio exports.

How reliable is the language quality in generated texts?

Stories are written by AI and automatically checked against the vocabulary and grammar rules of the selected level. Because the check is automated rather than done by a human editor, an occasional slip can get through, so you should review each text before sharing it with your students. At launch, you will be able to change any sentence or translation before sending it out.

How does Stichos handle Ukrainian grammar features like the vocative case?

Ukrainian uses a distinct vocative case as a seventh case to address people, such as turning Олена into Олено!, which is ideal to include in beginner dialogues right from the start. Additionally, Ukrainian features mobile stress across word forms and uses specific letters like і, ї, є, and ґ that differ from other Slavic scripts.