This made me chuckle, and took me back to my attempts to learn Ukrainian. Like you, I'm at home with Romance languages like French and Spanish, but the Cyrillic alphabet was a whole new ball game. On the Canadian island where I live there aren't a lot of places to hear Ukrainian spoken so I decided to attend a Ukrainian church service. Something I said after the service prompted attendees to burst into applause for me. Not sure what I said, but I was a hit! LOL