What are the major pronunciation mistakes of Italians speaking Ukrainian?

Question

I'm Italian and I'm a beginning student of Ukrainian. I have no contact with the language in my daily life apart from the time I devote to it through self-study, and, as a consequence, I've been studying Ukrainian pronunciation from academic descriptions and by listening to Ukrainian songs and Youtube channels. Because of this, I have never had any feedback on my pronunciation. It seems to me that from the point of view of an Italian the main difficulties in Ukrainian are:

1. Correct word-stress placement.
2. The sounds of г, л, ль, ць and also, perhaps to a lesser extent, other soft sounds.
3. Ukrainian prosody and intonation must differ from Italian, although I haven't paid attention to this point.

Here is a recording of myself reading a short story (П’ять хлібин) and I would be very grateful to hear some opinions on my delivery, so that I can focus on those particular aspects (there's no need to listen to all of it, of course). The text of the story is here. I've painstakingly checked the word stresses for all words using the online version of словники України. Any suggestion is welcome!

Answer 1

Good job! Your pronunciation is far, far better than anyone else's known to me.

A few words have unusual stress, but keep in mind that every live language has dialects, and stress patterns and prosody vary a lot between those. What you think a mistake can be perceived a dialect. Keep moving and start communicating with native language speakers. Once you do so, your stress patterns will adjust by themselves.

Here is one aspect I've noticed. Again, it does not stand in the way for the comprehension at all!

In some words ending with a plosive or nasal consonant, e.g. хлібин, суд etc., it is perceived like you produce an extra mid-central vowel (/-e/, or rather /-ə/ Schwa) — short, but noticeable. Italian words usually end with a vowel, and many native speakers of Italian speak this way in foreign languages. The "vowel filler" at the end of words is, in fact, a known phenomenon which denotes "Italian accent".

The rest is perfect. Keep your study and thank you for your interest in the Ukrainian language.

---

Update. I have re-listened to the story and made my notes where I think the stress or prosody should be different. Again, there are very few places like this and they in no way harm the comprehension.

As I said, different dialects have different stress patterns; mine is Kyiv/North-Central.