GERMAN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF UKRAINIAN REFUGEES IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND INTEGRATION POTENTIAL

Abstract

Having found themselves in unpredictable and difficult life circumstances starting from the end of February 2022, Ukrainian refugees in Germany faced a barrier of a linguistic nature, and therefore of a social and cultural nature. In order to solve many urgent life tasks and meet the needs and maximum integrated functioning in the German-speaking environment, the question arose of learning not only the German language, but also culture through the language. The article outlines the current situation related to the study of the German language by Ukrainian refugees in Germany and outlines the difficulties of learning language collocations, fixed expressions and phraseological units at the initial stage of learning German as a foreign language in accordance with the conditionally level criterias of the European Language Standard in order to successfully understand and master the language in in the context of integration processes. The study contains survey and testing data of Ukrainian refugees in Germany, which relate to separate realities of the ethno-cultural level, fixed word combinations, collocations and idioms, phraseological expressions, reveal examples of difficulties in learning and acquisition the German language, which require transformations or switching language codes during the learning process. The survey and its results direct attention to ethnolinguistic components in the form of idiomatic expressions that do not have counterparts in the native language, their meaning is figurative, implies the possession of ethnocultural information, and can also be understood thanks to linguistic guesswork and previous experience. Set expressions in the form of collocations contain typical word combinations of the German language, which are not characteristic for Ukrainian speakers. Understanding and acquisition the above mentioned language categories is the key to the successful formation of sociocultural competence for intercultural communication in the context of integration processes.