Every lemma in Ukraine's two published beginner vocabulary sources, joined and compared.
Ukrainian now has two independent, open answers to the question every beginner course must answer first, and they were built to answer different questions.
| The minimums | The profile | |
|---|---|---|
| what | “1000 i 1 slovo”, A1 and A2 | Ukrainian Vocabulary Profile (PULS) |
| who | Borodin and Turkevych; Borodin and Lazarenko | Synchak, Starko, Burak, Svystun |
| kind | a teaching syllabus | a descriptive map |
| size | about 2,000 words | 10,194 lemma strings, A1 to C1 |
| method | expert selection over corpus frequency, weighted by usefulness at the learning stage | corpus-validated CEFR levels |
Nobody had joined them. A syllabus and a descriptive profile are allowed to disagree, and where they do is the interesting part, so it seemed better to measure it than to guess.
One row per lemma, on a corpus frequency spine (UberText 2.0, top 12,000 lemmas).
| Class | Rows | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| agree | 1,200 | both place it at the same level |
| earlier | 583 | the syllabus teaches it before the profile validates it |
| later | 174 | the syllabus teaches it after |
| absent | 776 | validated A1 (84) or A2 (692), in neither volume |
| unprofiled | 172 | in a volume, outside the profile's scope |
| beyond | 7,461 | validated B1 or higher and outside a 2,000-word syllabus |
Two efforts built by different methods place 1,200 words at the same CEFR level. That is a convergence result: the beginner core of Ukrainian is a real object that two independent methods can find.
The profile validates all five of these at A1. The A1 volume holds every one of them back to A2.
| Word | Corpus rank | Profile | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| до | 9 | A1 | A2 |
| для | 21 | A1 | A2 |
| від | 22 | A1 | A2 |
| якщо | 87 | A1 | A2 |
| без | 130 | A1 | A2 |
The A1 volume does carry по, про and через. So this is a line, not an omission.
A deliberate pedagogical decision, and a good one, now confirmed by the authors: when a word was assigned to A1 or A2, the grammar it needs was weighed with it, and a preposition whose case a beginner has not yet met (the genitive, the instrumental) was held back to A2 on purpose. That reasoning does not survive into a published word list, which is exactly why a crosswalk is worth having: it asked the question.
Two more things the volumes do not say: the selection follows the Official State Standard for Ukrainian as a Foreign Language, aligned with CEFR, under a strict cap of 1,000 words per level. Kseniia Borodin, personal correspondence, September 24, 2026.
Three limits. No reading survives ignoring them.
So the absent column is a list of candidates to check, never a list of omissions. Of the 84 validated-A1 words in neither volume, 40 have no relative anywhere in either volume; those are the ones worth looking at first: ситуація, кожний, момент, музей, ну, мільярд, продукт, герой.
A further 19 absent rows name the phrase that does reach the word, so такий reads against такий самий and жаль against На жаль.
One row per lemma. Filter the class column to the question you have.
later and absent are your candidate lists.earlier is where the syllabus is ahead of the validated profile, with the frequency rank beside each word.unprofiled is what a syllabus teaches that the profile does not cover. Mostly proper nouns and the adjectives built on them, which is scope, not a gap.The entry column carries the published entry line verbatim, so every row can be traced back to the book it came from.
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