How to Learn Romanian Los Angeles CA

Steps

1. Find a Romanian teacher with a fluent level of English or of your native language. The other way round (someone who speaks your native language as a mother tongue and has a high level of Romanian) is pretty unlikely (unless you are Hungarian, maybe), as Romanian is not spoken worldwide; besides, a teacher is a must, because Romanian grammar is very difficult to understand, even for native speakers.
2. Get accustomed to the Romanian alphabet and pronunciation. In Romanian, words are spelled just like they're written. Check the table at Wikipedia for more info.
   • Careful how you place the accent on syllables. It's quite tricky. Getting a Romanian-to-Romanian dictionary and looking up some words just to see how the accent is on them is very helpful.
3. Get accustomed to the Romanian specific characters: "?", "î" or "â" (both spelled the same; there is a minor writing difference, though), "?", and "?". Practice reading them properly in texts.
   • "?" is spelled like "a", like in "a (man)" (sound /?/)
   • "î" or "â" both correspond to the sound /?/. There is no equivalent sound in English phonetics.
   • "?" is spelled like "sh" in "sheep" (sound /?/)
   • "?" is spelled /?/
4. Buy a Romanian course-book, that provides you with some texts and lists of words and their translation. Also buy an English-to-Romanian and a Romanian-to-English one, since there are a lot of words you will not know.
5. Learn some basic words and sentences in Romanian. They're useful even if you don't want to study the language and are just going on a trip to Romania.
   • "Da"="Yes"
   • "Nu"="No"
   • "Bun?!"="Hello!"
   • "Bun? ziua!"="Good afternoon!"
   • "Bun? seara!"="Good evening!"
   • "La revedere!"="Goodbye!"
   • "Mul?umesc!"="Thank You!"
   • "V? rog/Te rog"="Please"; note that "V? rog" is the plural form, more polite and formal, while "Te rog" is informal.
   • "Îmi pare r?u!"="I'm sorry"
6. Move on to simple sentences, like saying your name, age, and nationality. Learn a few basic verbs, like "a fi" ("to be"), "a avea" ("to have"), "a merge" ("to go"), "a face" ("to do") etc. Also learn the numbers from 0 to 100, as you have to know them to tell your age. Here are a few examples:
   • "M? numesc John"="My name is John"
   • "Am dou?zeci de ani"="I'm twenty years old"- Careful! The verb used in Romanian to express age is "a avea" ("to have"), not "a fi" ("to be").
   • "Sunt american"="I'm American"
7. Using the dictionaries, learn 20 new Romanian words a week. Write them in a list in your notebook and say them aloud until you memorize them. This will help expanding your vocabulary.
8. Learn Romanian grammar. That's the most difficult part. It is very difficult even for native speakers to learn all the rules (and the hundreds of exceptions), but it's not impossible. Here are a few basic rules:
   • The indefinite articles are "un" (masculine, singular), "o" (feminine, singular) and "ni?te" (both genders, plural); the definite articles are found in the ending of the words.
   • There are 3 genders in Romanian grammar: masculine, feminine and neutral. The neutral nouns are those who have the singular form at masculine and the plural form at feminine.
   • There are 5 cases in Romanian: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative. Each noun has different forms, according to the gender and number of the noun. The genitive and dative form are identical, and so are the nominative and accusative form. The vocative case is used when calling someone/addressing to someone directly (for example calling somebody's name to catch their attention).
   • There are 3 voices in Romanian: the active voice, the passive voice and the reflexive voice. The reflexive voice is used when the doer and the sufferer of the action are one and the same; in English, the reflexive voice is covered by one of the uses of passive voice. Example: "M? îmbrac"="I'm getting dressed". The passive voice is used only when the subject suffers the action and the doer of the action is someone else. Example: "Ho?ul a fost arestat de c?tre poli?ie"="The thief was arrested by the police".
   • There are 8 verbal moods in Romanian: infinitive, indicative, subjunctive, conditional, presumptive, imperative, supine, participle, and gerund. The verbs in the indicative, subjunctive, conditional, presumptive, and imperative moods can be used as predicates into a sentence, while the other four, called impersonal (infinitive, supine, participle, and gerund), cannot.
     • The indicative mood has 8 tenses: present, imperfect, perfect simple, compound perfect, pluperfect, future, popular future, and future in the past. Present corresponds to both present simple and present continuous (and sometimes even to present perfect); imperfect corresponds to past continuous; the simple perfect tense, corresponding to the past simple, is old-fashioned and used only in some regions of Romania; now it has been largely replaced with the compound perfect tense, which also corresponds to past simple and present perfect; and pluperfect corresponds to past perfect.
     • The subjunctive mood has 2 tenses: past and present. It corresponds to a certain use of infinitive in English (for example, "Vreau s? plec" meaning "I want to leave").
     • The conditional mood also has 2 tenses (past and present). It is used under the same circumstances as in English.

Tips

• Some people who have successfully taught Romanian have found it to be extremely useful to get some Romanian music. Listening to it can help you get a feel for the way it sounds, reading the lyrics can help you learn the pronunciation, reading a translation can increase your vocabulary, and trying to translate it yourself can be a help.
• See if you can make a friend online who speaks Romanian who could help you with your studies. Even someone who is also studying it can help a bit. And whether or not they help you at all, they can still help motivate you, and you might get a true friendship out of this.
• It will be easier for you to learn Romanian if you already know other Latin languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese or Italian. However, as Romania is the only Romance language speaking country in Eastern Europe, Romanian evolved separated from the languages mentioned above, thus a non-skilled Romanian speaker might not notice the similarities between Romanian and the other Latin languages, due to the Slavic influence Romanian has received shortly after its formation.
• Though this article is how to learn it, not how to speak it, this seems like a place to point out one of the things that confuses a lot of people: the words "e" and "este". They actually mean the same thing. However, "este" is more formal.
• It definitely is a good language to learn, not only will it help you understand languages like Spanish, French among other things (it is a Latin language) but knowing more than one language can prove to be rather useful at times.

Sources and Citations

• http://www.dictionare.com/english/dictionary.htm - Romanian-English Dictionary -- also conjugates verbs and finds the declinations of nouns.
• http://www.romanianlessons.com/ - Online Free Romanian Lessons
• http://www.gizmology.net/charlotte/versuri.htm - Romanian Popular Music -- also, the site language can be switched to Romanian from the index to give you practice material

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