Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Japan has received over 2,000 evacuees from Ukraine.

As the conflict rages on, more are looking to stay long-term, but the language barrier is a hurdle.

Today's guest, Maksym Haichenko, is from Ukraine.

He works at a Japanese IT company,

where he's developed a free Japanese language learning app for Ukraine evacuees.

Haichenko is currently 19 years old.

He, too, came to Japan to flee the Russian invasion.

I can see lots of people struggling studying Japanese, making their best.

Japanese is really basic if you want to work here in Japan,

if you want to have friends in Japan,

so if you don't understand Japanese, you don't have any other ways.

That's the basic part that we want to help people with.

The app has been well received among fellow evacuees,

and some have gone on to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

It's super easy to use!

I use it daily.

I'm studying vocab so I can pass the JLPT!

We ask Haichenko about his work to help fellow Ukrainians in Japan learn the language.

Haichenko works for a startup based here in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward.

Founded in 2016, it develops AI-powered learning apps and more.

Its staff of 140 are a diverse bunch, with members who hail from the U.S., France,

China, South Korea, Taiwan, and more.

As part of their efforts to support Ukraine evacuees,

in 2022, they launched a project aimed at helping them learn Japanese.

In the application, there are a lot of different types of tasks, you can type in,

speaking, like choosing, inputting from keyboard.

Hello

Watch out!

This task plays audio of a Japanese wordphrase,

and the user must select the equivalent Ukrainian expression.

This task asks the user to transcribe the displayed word using kanji characters.

Here, they name prefectures on a map of Japan using the pictures as clues.

The app is designed to teach the user basic information they'll need to live in Japanese society.

Seven

If the user gets a question wrong, the AI is programmed to display it again.

If you talk about something that was hard for me when I was making the program,

maybe the hardest thing is about translating Japanese to Ukrainian.

Ukrainian and Japanese are completely different languages,

so even if you translate it directly, Ukrainians can't understand sometimes.

For example, when you say in Japanese "otsukaresamadesu,"

there is no such expression in Ukrainian, so you have, somehow explain it,

you should put more detailed description about it.

As I am not Japanese, sometimes I can also mistake a word,

so I have to really check it, discuss it with my colleagues, try to, is it ok to translate it like this.

So maybe the hard thing is when you discuss one word for ten minutes

with colleagues and there are like really 2,000 words,

and you have to discuss one by one for ten minutes,

of course sometimes it's more either more difficult,

but when you have to discuss one word for ten minutes, it's real exhausting,

but this is the job I had been doing for 2 years.

The app Haichenko and his colleagues developed has been featured on the Ukrainian Embassy's social media,

and has been used by over 400 Ukrainians living in Japan.

15 of them have now passed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

Of course I hear a lot of greetings, thanks from people.

"They are really good information, thank you," "it helped me."

And after the test some people told me,

"if I didn't hear this information from you, I think I won't like do something"

"I won't take it to the test. I won't think that way." So probably fail.

It's the most...The greatest thing I can hear that my advice helped somebody.

Haichenko was born and raised in the city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine.

He took an interest in Japan when he was in middle school.

He became captivated by anime and started taking Japanese lessons so that he could enjoy the works in their original language.

So I started watching anime, it was really great,

and I thought I want to be able to watch anime without subtitles in Japanese as it is in the original,

so I started learning Japanese by my own, learning hiragana/katakana, but it didn't go well.

So I found a teacher that helped me,

she is Ukrainian but she was living in Japan for 3 years,

so she was really fluent in Japan, in Japanese, and she helped me study Japanese for 3 years.

The things that she told me when I was studying Japanese,

Japan is not like anime, Japan is like this, Japan has own problems and has all this culture and it's not hard,

it's not easy, it's easy, it's hard, and a lot of things that usually people who have not lived in Japan don't,

doesn't understand, she told me and so when I came to Japan I was like oh yeah, it was like as she said.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the National Aviation University in Kyiv,

where he began studying cybersecurity and information technologies.

But then in February 2022, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.

Everything changed in an instant.

After the full-scale invasion started, I was living in Kyiv for 3 months,

I was working in a coffee shop, and the man in the coffee shop,

the owner, is still fighting right now, he's still at the war, and my uncle,

he's also out there, and a friend of our family, he died, he passed away,

he died 3 months ago, 2 months ago.

Everybody... there is no Ukrainian who have not relatives or somebody who's not fighting.

After talking it over many times with his parents,

he decided to evacuate to Japan with the support of a humanitarian foundation.

Initially, he attended Japanese classes while making ends meet by working part-time at a coffee chain.

Then one day he learned about a company that was looking for people knowledgeable about IT who could speak both Japanese and Ukrainian.

Haichenko went in for an interview at the firm where he now works.

For me it was really an easy way, I was studying Japanese for 3 years in Ukraine.

But Ukrainians who came here, with their level of Japanese,

they have to study somehow here and at the same time work here at the same time,

so I guess it's really difficult, it's really hard, I guess it's stressful.

So of course it's also have an impact on my feeling that I want to help that people.

But little by little, the pressures of his first "adult" job and the stress of cultural barriers began to build up.

Meanwhile, he was also continuing his university studies virtually, which was leaving him feeling fatigued.

Still, he kept his struggles to himself and tried to push through it.

Then one day, he was chatting away with a coworker when he suddenly broke down into tears.

I understood, logically, that there is no like place to, to run from it.

Because I went from a country at war where things are much worse,

so to a friend, a very peaceful country, so it's now, not now, not about complaining selfish, I should just do my best,

but of course as a human, sometimes you should just, you should let your feelings go to the outside.

Haichenko's colleague Oba Marie was with him when he broke down.

I'd never imagined him crying.

He's someone who strives for perfection in what he does.

And in front of others, he always puts on a cheerful, brave face.

But underneath, he must've been dealing with a lot.

And he didn't have a place to vent.

Afterwards, I felt like I could've done more.

I wish I'd set aside more space and time to be there for him.

As his colleague, I hope to continue looking out for him.

Since the incident, Haichenko has become closer and more communicative with his coworkers and superiors,

and his Japanese has also improved exponentially as a result.

He passed N1, the highest level of the JLPT.

He even won an award in a Japanese speech contest for foreign residents.

It's been a year and ten months since Haichenko joined the app project.

Word of the app has spread among his fellow evacuees,

and online information sessions now get many participants.

Hearing about their struggles has made him realize their app is more necessary than ever.

So there were really simple questions, like, "how can I apply to get a credit card?"

Credit card system in Japan is not so simple.

I guess it's something about speaking to Japanese people,

"How can I get well with them?" "Where I can make Japanese people friends?"

People told me about their situations they would get in, and how they deal with them in Japanese.

Daryna Myronenko is a regular user of the app.

She and her family fled to Japan immediately following the start of Russia's invasion.

Daryna currently attends a Japanese high school.

She was having trouble learning the language when she discovered Haichenko's app.

It repeats questions until you learn the word.

It's really great!

My Japanese has improved.

I made a lot of work about studying Japanese.

The greatest part is if I will continue to help them study Japanese as I have been doing for two years till now.

For now, I've had a lot of experience in Japanese business, Japanese culture,

also as I am Ukrainian I know about Ukrainian culture in Ukraine.

In the future, even now, and when the war ends in Ukraine,

at least we have to create this bridge between Japan and Ukraine.

For example Japanese companies can open their business in Ukraine.

If I can help them, I guess it's my goal for nearest future,

to push economic from Japan to Ukraine,

and to make something meaningful for Japan through Ukraine's culture and Ukraine's economy.

My motto is "90% percent of your life depends on your perception of it."

In our lives we meet different situations with struggle, and sometimes there're good events.

But even if it's bad there's nothing to do with crying, you have to take action to do something with it.

And if it's a situation you can do nothing about, just take it as it is, and you'll feel better.

We have a lot of biases in our head, and I guess we should fight with them, until we die.

And try to see this world more perceptively.