Ukrainian or Russian for every day use?
As it sit here and type this, I think this is possibly one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever asked, but here we go:
Back in January, I met a couple people from Ukraine who didn’t speak any of the languages I do, but we got to talking anyway through translation apps. I started learning Ukrainian so I could communicate with them better (seen them a few times since then). My Ukrainian is about what you’d expect for someone learning it “on the back burner” for 3-4 months, but I can manage some simple small talk.
I’ve met several other people from Ukraine over the last month or two, and have tried to speak in my limited, probably bad, Ukrainian. Sometimes they understand me, sometimes they don’t. Either way, we eventually end up using a translation app anyway as we progress past niceties. Thing is, the Ukrainians I’ve met in the last month or two have all asked for the translation app to use Russian, not Ukrainian, which I had set it to. Just seemed a little odd to me, I know Russian is widely known in Ukraine (I’ve been told if I want to learn a language to speak with Ukrainians I should learn Russian because most every one knows it anyway, and it’d be more of a “multiple birds with one stone” type of language, but since my only interest in Russian would be speaking with Ukrainians that I’ve been meeting a lot more recently it seemed weird to try and learn their _second_ language instead of their native one), but I’d have assumed they’d want the translation in (what I assume would be more of) their “native language”: Ukrainian.
Obviously everyone’s different and it’s a case-by-case thing, but, it’s been like 13 out of 13 Ukrainians I’ve met in the last month or two. So my question is: is using Russian over Ukrainian super common? As like an “at-home”/“daily speaker” type language? And if so, should I be starting out trying to use Russian instead of trying to speak in Ukrainian? Or have I just found essentially the only 13 Ukrainians that would prefer Russian over Ukrainian? Or is there possibly something else going on I may be missing? Just trying to understand more of the culture as a whole and I could just ask the friends from January or these people im meeting but speaking through translation apps is slow going and this seems like something where there might be a fair bit of discussion/discourse, so thought I’d try and pose this to a larger community.