From time to time, I get emails from people asking me to teach them Romanian. Most of the time, I wonder if they are asking me to teach them how to be Romanian or how to speak Romanian. By the time you are done reading and watching – you should be able to speak Romanian better than I do English.
That means you won’t speak Romanian , you will just make some weird sounds and pretend that you speak a foreign language, but with some linguist charity, you will get over it.
From my personal experience, it’s the latter. Most requests I get start with :
I have a Romanian boyfriend or a Romanian girlfriend.
Lucky you, I have a dog (not a real one ) and bills to pay (those are real). I must be your typical Romanian. Yes , to your question.
I sleep in the cupboard when I have panic attacks or too much sarmale.
I only come out from the cupboard to knock on the pipes, to let the neighbours know that I am still alive, before the authorities in white coats or the Tory party can take me away.
I’m doing well thou, considering that I have over 3k friends on the internet.
I have no idea who they are, except for my sister, who contacted me to let me know that she is unfriending me on Facebook and she is actively trying to guess my password in order to post a picture of me that could destroy my online reputation.
When I Googled : do I have a sister it turns out that I don’t. Sometimes I wonder if I trust Google too much. I don’t have a clue who that girl is.
A few months later, I’ve got a request via Yahoo mail to attend a wedding to the so called sister of mine after she said that I bad mouthed her at every opportunity, including on the internet. Google is always right.
If you still want me to teach you a personalised Romanian language, please do insist on that. Just don’t come back to me when you are single and you have no friends.
The 3k friends online that I mentioned are not real, I made them up and I don’t remember the password to unfriend myself.
See what happened to these two guys when they tried to sing in Romanian, the video cuts off before they jump out from the 2nd floor.
I can be weird sometimes but you can rely on me when it comes to smuggling cigarettes in – from Europe. I have a double personality that allows me to bring in 400 cigarettes instead of 200 and a medical certificate printed at home that shows a picture of a cat. It works, but don’t try it yourself because it is not my cat.
Lean back and watch this ( notice that I don’t use the word please )
Romanian idioms & expressions in English. The blank white screen is there to confuse you even more. U welcome
3 Comments
This is appalling, how can you even think, let alone write that ?!
I don’t know why some people say Romanian sounds Slavic.. My native language is polish, I also speak Russian & Czech – to me Romanian DOESN’T sound any Slavic. I rarely hear other Slavic languages but when I do – I can recognise them immediately. Romanian on the other hand.. When I first heard it – I thought it was some heavy Italian dialect. Even all the words that came from
Slavic languages are changed so much that it’s almost impossible to get them. It’s a beautiful language though. I really love the way it sounds.
Eu sunt armean. Și acum studiez română. Îmi place această limbă foarte mult. Și țara voastră este atât frumoasă. Și istoria foarte bogată.
Eu chiar am scris o poezie în română.
Salutări tuturor românilor!
We love our Latin brothers and sisters ❤️ ❤️
As a native Romanian and French speaker, when I don’t remember a word in Romanian, I just take the word in French and pronounce it as if it was a Romanian word. It works 70% of the time
Sunt italian, dar vorbesc și franceza și engleza. Confirm că italiana și romana sunt limbi foarte apropiate. Deși mai fac multe greșeli, am o cunoaștere intermediară a limbii române pe care am învățat-o alături de iubita mea de origine română. M-am îndrăgostit de România și acum, pentru mine, nu mai trece Crăciunul fără să mănânc sarmale din Banat! Salutări tuturor românilor!
I am from Italy and obviously Italian is my mother tongue. I also speak fluent English and Spanish. After a week in Romania I could understand basic communications and I could answer in English or Italian to People and we could communicate with very little issues. Also, most Romanians are nice enough to speak slower for tourists if you want to play the “I speak Italian you answer in Romanian” game. Most waiters/retail workers were quite amused about my attempts of basic conversation and ordering food/drinks in Romanian.
I’m a Brazilian Canadian who dealt with a lot of Romanians while living in Canada. My 2 cents about it: They can understand much more Portuguese than I ever thought they could
I’m French and I need to move to România this year for my study. I had no idea what Romanian was like, but I started learning it in the spur of the moment. And I was so shocked to realize it was a Roman language! Anyway, it made my learning much easier than I expected, so it was a good surprise 😉 Limba română este foarte frumoasă ~
Oddly enough, “foarte bine” resembles Catalan “força bé” with the same meaning!They sound like in Catalan, my language
I’m a portuguese speaker. Many of the romanian words are very similar to the portuguese translations.
As a native spanish speaker I’d say I understand about 50% of spoken romanian and about 70% of written romanian.Now, what I like the most is how some words developed in a different way in romanian; for instance the word “inima” that means “heart” comes from the latin word “anima” but in latin it means “soul”, and like this there are many other words like “lume” “suflet” “merge” “fara”… undoubtly romanian is a very poetic langauge. Eu ador limba romana.
The Romans wouldn’t understand why there are so many definite articles in Italian, Spanish and French, and what happened to the cases.
Romanian to me sounds a lot like Portugese in pronunciation.
There was a real case in USSR when a Soviet soldier from Moldova run from the army and hid in a small remote village somewhere in Caucasus mountains. The local school didn’t have a teacher of international language for several years so they were very happy to hire him as a teacher of French but besides Russian he knew only Romanian so he taught Romanian language as French.
Many years later when a student at an university was claiming to know French but were speaking another language they sent a commission to that village and discovered that a large part of locals were speaking Romanian as a second language. But they loved him so much that they didn’t fired him but kept as teacher of Romanian language.
Spanish native speaker here, I’m really excited about how similar could be Romanian to Spanish
There is something people need to understand. Romanian has only been influenced lexicaly by the slavic peoples but it still is a romance language, you can make up phrases with only Latin inherited words, so when people say it sounds slavic is because there are only coincidences in phoneme inventory, but a lot of european languages share most of the consonants and vowels although if you hear closely they are never pronounced evenly in neither language. Sounds like s z ʃ ts tʃ dʒ are the same in Italian and Romanian; romanian, Portuguese, catalan and french share s z ʃ ʒ amongst other consonants. Or there are words that were conserved only in Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian e.g. mesa/mesa/masă, poner/pôr/a pune, hermoso/formoso/frumos, etc. When Romanian was already shaped, slavic languages were pretty far away from Europe and they were spoken by tribes back in the day. The Old Slavonic Orthodox church and the assimilation of slavic people were the biggest influence though in some part of the vocabulary and grammar. Still Romanian is a romance language.
I am Aromanian and I must tell you that we are Romanians and we are using a branch of Romanian language not other language!
P.S. “Vlachs” is the name used by Greek and Slavik people for what we name Romanians. Aka Vlach=Romanian.
French is my first language and we actually can and sometimes do use “fort” too mean very. If we take your sentence example:
“Je connais fort bien l’histoire de l’Europe.” is totaly acceptable!
I’m brazilian, and i’m impressed of how much i could understand of it
I have a Romanian coworker and I was amazed at how well she spoke Spanish despite having been in Spain for only a couple of years, considering I have many native Portuguese speaking friends who are really hard to understand despite being here for over a decade.
Then I heard her talk in the phone with her Romanian relatives and while the language is unintelligible they pronounce leter sounds pretty similar to us, and that’s why she is so good at spanish
Really cool language, I love how it sounds and the way it is so strangely different from Italian and Spanish. it’s a pity that politics ruin the relationship between our peoples… Greetings from Hungary
funny thing is that in portuguese we use “eu” for “I”. that’s different from all other latin language. However in romanian it is also “eu”. How come
Well, I’m from the Fiji Islands and I speak Romanian and Italian. Mi-e dor de România și de Republica Moldova. Sper că într-o zi pot să mă intorc în România și în Moldova pentru că acum, încet câte încet, încep să uit limba cea mai frumoasă din toata lumea.
I’m a native Portuguese speaker. I speak also Italian and Spanish. I do not speak Romanian, but I can understand about 60% of a written text. For this I use my knowledge in the other 3 languages.
I speak Spanish and it’s quite easy to understand Romanian for me !
I am Italian, I speak French and Russian.. It’s incredible how easy romanian can sound to me! But I want to add that romanian language has a lot of common words with italian southern dialects, that make it even closer for us (and funnier, actually)!
Sadly, they adopted Slavic accents Anyway, I have already started learning it all the love from Colombia
Depinde din ce raion esti