by I’ve made reasonably good progress with Romanian so far, I think. Off the top of my head I know how to say I’m happy or sad or bored or tired or proud or ashamed or tall or short. I don’t remember knowing any of that after the same length of time learning French. I’ve spent a good number of hours in the last ten weeks reading and listening to Romanian, and a smaller but still significant amount of time writing it. What I haven’t done yet, and what I really need to do, is speak it. (OK, I have spoken it a bit, to myself, but I’ll soon be getting a flatmate and he might think I’m nuts.) So far what I’ve done is the equivalent of learning how to play tennis by hitting against a wall. I can now hit a half-decent forehand, backhand and volley, but I’m buggered if I have to react to someone else’s forehands, backhands and volleys. Problem number one: how do I find someone in Wellington to speak Romanian with? My best bet was the Romanian lady who turns up to the tennis club every six months or so, but she never replied to my email. It looks like I’ll have to go online, and for me that will take cojones or whatever the Romanian word is. I haven’t got that far yet.
Problem number two: as a native English speaker, the bar is constantly being raised. By that, I mean that the standard of Romanian I’d need to reach before it becomes really useful gets higher by the day. That’s because the average Romanian’s English gets better by the day, and unless I get fairly good at Romanian, people are likely to just respond to me in English if and when I get over there. Interestingly when I last went to Italy in 2010 I didn’t have this problem, even though my Italian was only at a high basic (or low intermediate) level; if you speak German at that sort of level you don’t stand a chance. I expect Romanian to be somewhere in between. A day will probably come when it is no longer worth an English speaker’s while to learn any foreign language; that will be a sad day.
Problem number three: there aren’t a ton of textbooks, phrase books, CDs or websites to help me learn the language. This isn’t French or Spanish or German or even Mandarin. It just isn’t very popular. But there is a lot of real-life material out there like YouTube videos and online articles. After all, over 20 million people speak Romanian and a great many of them have large digital footprints. In a way, having to use “proper” material makes the learning experience more fun. It reminds me of the time I tried to figure out badugi, a relatively obscure poker game, with the aid of a spreadsheet. I made enough money from that game to pay for a month-long trip to America. I hope Romanian treats me as well as badugi did.
I’ll talk about exactly what real-life material I have been using in my next post.
