"Я жив у Одесі."

Translation: I lived in Odesa.

[SmithUA01]

Is "Odesa" a legitimate English spelling as well?

[jmango2]

It would make sense, since they insist on the Ukrainian transliteration of Kyiv even though Kiev is probably the more common of the two.

[SmithUA01]

That I think is totally legitimate, by analogy with using Gdansk instead of Danzig. But Odesa is less clear-cut; the language you'll most often find spoken on the streets is Russian, in which it's spelt with two s's... so do we transliterate that, or...?

[TARDISToni]

I am not sure why the Duolingo creators are using this spelling; I think they're trying to promote a direct transliteration of the Ukrainian Cyrillic spellings in place names (as noted with 'Kyiv' above). I am a native speaker of English, and all my life I have seen the spellings as "Odessa" and "Kiev."

[obado]

I agree. This course should be teaching us Ukrainian, not imposing new norms on English spellings of Ukrainian things. So for me it is Odessa and Kiev

[joefeyzullah]

Guys this is not Russian course.