What You Like Will Rule a Sentence

Lessons from Ukrainian class and the Lviv National Opera.

Something I still haven’t fully managed to wrap my head around in studying Ukrainian are the language’s reflexive verb endings. This confusion is highlighted in the past tense, where verb endings are based on the gender of their subjects, rather than the typical six-part structure of first, second, and third person singular and plural. Reflexive verbs, too, take after their subject, but the translation into English muddies what the subject of these sentences actually are.

Exhibit A is the verb podobayet’sya, “to like.” On an assignment last week, where I was meant to write “she liked this dessert,” I wrote: Yiy podobalacya tsey dessert, conjugating the verb for “to like” in the feminine singular for “she.” This was, my teacher pointed out, incorrect, since the Ukrainian word for dessert is masculine and this is the real subject of the sentence, meaning the correct conjugation would be podobavcya. The more literal translation of this would be: “The dessert pleased her.”

“What you like wi…