by Romanian is the coolest language I’ve ever tried to learn (for me anyway – we’re all different) but there just is so much to learn. I’m working my way through the excellent Learn Romanian with Nico lessons on YouTube (and she’s still in the process of creating more lessons; she’s so far up to number 34). Nico makes it fun and that helps a lot. It looks like she can speak at least four languages herself. A lot of Romanians seem to be tri- or quadrilingual, while we English speakers are proudly monolingual and miss out on so much as a result. In English classes at school I learned virtually nothing about how language is structured; I was told that an adjective was a “describing word” and a verb was a “doing word” and that every sentence must have one of those doing words in it or else it’s not doing anything and isn’t a real sentence. And that was about it. I learned much more about the English language when I started to learn French.
Other than YouTube videos I’ve mainly been relying on a notebook and flash cards (hundreds of old unused business cards). One of the biggest challenges I explained here: every noun has a plural form, an articulated form, and a plural articulated form, and that’s before you get into cases. So every time you come across a new noun, you don’t have to learn one word but several. As for verbs, there are four categories of verb conjugations but there’s a ton of variation between each category, and sound changes abound. Adjectives at this stage seem a little simpler. Once you’ve learned the words you then have to put them together, and that’s no easy task. Romanian doesn’t seem to work like French where you can learn a bunch of really useful stock-standard phrases before you even know what each word means.
Wordplay can be useful in committing new words and phrases to memory. Occasionally the word will be an anagram of English word, such as ieftin which means cheap (something I can afford given my finite resources) or galben which means yellow (I can think of a yellow bangle). Sometimes it will be an English word, such as drum (= road) or slab (= weak). Other times the letter combination just makes me happy, as in a zbura (to fly) or zgomot (noise). Seriously? Romanian has words beginning with “zb” and “zg”? This language just gets better.
I mentioned before that Romanian uses five accented letters: ă, â, î, ș and ț, but there are also four “normal” letters that it doesn’t use, namely k, q, w and y. (There are however loanwords, such as “whisky”, that do make use of these letters.) Lack of Q was a bit of a surprise to me: you can’t count to twenty in French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese without coming across Q, and it’s also used in a lot of question words in those languages. Where “qu” might have come into play, “cv” is used instead, as in acvatic. Lack of Y is less of a surprise, because I often takes its place just like it does in Italian (an example being the first i in ieftin above).
Talking of loanwords, a surprising number come from French. e.g. trotuar (trottoir = pavement), șofer (chauffeur/driver), șosete (chaussettes = socks), birou (bureau), tricou (tricot = T-shirt), and many more.
There’s a Romanian lady at the tennis club whom I hadn’t seen in months… until last weekend. Unfortunately with so many other people around, and me being me, I didn’t get the chance to speak to her in any language, but I’ve managed to get in contact with her since and hopefully we can have a chat. She could be an extremely useful contact for me, as well as a potential friend.
