The short answer

Ukrainian is easier to say than Russian for one specific reason: it does not reduce its unstressed vowels, so the spoken word stays close to the written one. What is left to master is a short list of sounds, the breathy г, the vowels и and і, the soft consonants, that a transcript flattens away. Here your audio goes to the model directly. Cyrillic is shown with a Latin reading underneath by default, so a beginner is never locked out.

Ukrainian is often assumed to be a dialect of Russian by people who have not met it, and it is a separate language with its own sound, its own vocabulary, and one large advantage for a learner: it is spoken very much the way it is written.

What you see is close to what you say

Russian makes you learn a second, spoken version of every word, because its unstressed vowels collapse. Ukrainian does not. An o stays an o and an e stays an e, wherever they fall. молоко is “mo-lo-ko”, plainly.

What is left to learn is a handful of specific sounds. The letter г is a breathy “h”, not a “g”, and saying it as a g is the single clearest sign of a Russian accent. The vowels и and і are different, a back “i” against a clear “ee”, and they tell words apart. Consonants come in soft and hard versions, and a small apostrophe is what keeps one hard: п’ять is “p-yat”, with a full separate “y”, not a softened p.

Why the tutor hearing you is the point

Your audio goes to the model directly and it answers in audio, so it is responding to how you sound. A soft consonant said hard, or г said as g, is invisible to a transcriber, which hands the tutor a correctly spelled word and no hint that you mispronounced it. The tutor that hears you can feed the sound back to you properly inside its own reply, without stopping the conversation to mark you.

Cyrillic, and the reading underneath

The tutor writes in Cyrillic, because reading it is part of learning the language and it comes quickly. Ukrainian’s alphabet is close to Russian’s but not identical: it has і, ї, є and ґ, and it does without a few Russian letters.

A Latin reading of your own speech is shown underneath by default. Anyone who can already read the alphabet turns it off in a moment; anyone who cannot has no way to find the setting, so it starts on and gets out of the way once you no longer need it.

What a session is

Unscripted conversation with something you can interrupt, backed by an authored CEFR syllabus of 242 items from A1.1 to C1, of which 117 are capabilities: concrete things you can do rather than grammar points. What you keep getting wrong shapes later sessions with nothing to configure.

The tutors carry the country’s regions in their voices, from the clear standard of Kyiv to the melodic western Ukrainian of Lviv, the grounded east of Kharkiv, and the quick, good-humoured south of Odesa.

Going to Ukraine

Travel Mode changes the app for a trip: rehearsal before you go, one real-world mission a day while you are there set in the city you are in, and a debrief afterwards about how the exchange actually went.

The five Ukrainian tutors

Every language has five, each from a different place and each sounding like it. You can switch whenever you like, and the app remembers where you are regardless of who you talk to.

OlehKyiv
Clear standard literary Ukrainian, evenly paced and easy to follow.
SolomiyaLviv
Melodic western Galician Ukrainian, softly spoken and a touch traditional, with careful enunciation.
AndriyKharkiv
Clear, grounded eastern Ukrainian with a calm, even delivery.
YuliyaOdesa
Bright, expressive southern Ukrainian with the lively, good-humoured rhythm of the port city.
TarasDnipro
Clear, neutral central-eastern Ukrainian with a steady, measured pace.

What English speakers usually find hard

These are drawn from the pronunciation patterns the tutor listens for in Ukrainian. Because it hears your voice rather than a transcript of it, they are things it can actually notice and work on with you.

Vowels stay clear, with no reduction: This is the big one, and it is good news. Unlike Russian, Ukrainian does not swallow unstressed vowels. An o is always an o, so молоко is "mo-lo-ko" and not "ma-la-ko", and an e is always an e. It keeps the spoken language much closer to the spelling than its neighbour.
г is an "h", not a "g": The letter г is a soft, breathy h, as in гарний and нога, and pronouncing it as a hard g is the clearest "Russian accent" tell there is. The hard g exists, but as a separate and much rarer letter, ґ.
и and і are two different vowels: и is a back, central vowel, roughly the "i" of "bit" pulled back; і is a clear front "ee". They are separate letters and they separate words: син, a son, against сін, of hay.
Soft consonants, and the apostrophe that blocks them: The soft sign and the vowels я, ю, є, і palatalise the consonant before them, folding a faint "y" glide into it, as in день and сіль. English has nothing quite like it. An apostrophe does the opposite, keeping the consonant hard and sounding a full, separate "y": п'ять is "p-yat", not a softened p.
в turns into a "w", and р is rolled: в is a "v" before a vowel but glides to a "w" at the end of a syllable, so був comes out "buw" and вовк "wowk". That is natural, not an error. The r, throughout, is a rolled alveolar trill, never the English approximant.