by Before I even came to Romania, I had a chat with a friend about the language. What’s it similar to? Is it hard? What makes it hard? I immediately answered that what makes Romanian hard are the pronouns. A pronoun-free sentence like “The church was destroyed in the war” shouldn’t present me too many problems, I thought, whereas “She told me to give this to you” would leave me in a right muddle. Almost five years on, I can get by OK in Romanian, but those damn pronouns are still a jumble in my mind.
Why are they so hard, at least for me? Lots of reasons.
1. They’re mostly short, shapeless words. For the same reason that I struggled to remember the three-letter Scrabble words, much more so than the longer words, these short pronouns are an indistinct blur.
2. Romanian has cases. These are a hold-over from Latin that other Romance languages have ditched but Romanian hasn’t. This means that the words for him in “I called him on the phone” and “I gave him some chocolates” aren’t the same. In “I called him”, calling is what you’re directly doing to him, and this requires the accusative case, while in “I gave him”, you’re not giving him, you’re giving something to him, and that requires the dative case. Although I conceptually get this, it’s hard to get right because of what we do (or don’t do) in English. (If you substitute “the boy” for “him” in the examples above, you again need two different words, but I find those longer nouns, rather than pronouns, a lot easier.)
3. Some verbs that work indirectly in English are direct in Romanian. For instance, you just listen the radio in Romanian, without the equivalent of to. You say “don’t lie me”, again without to.
4. Romanian uses an absolute ton of reflexive, which is like myself or herself in English. Some of my students tell me that they need to “prepare themselves” for job interviews, or that they like to “relax themselves” at weekends, because that’s what you say in Romanian. Reflexives are used in a lot of situations where a possessive is used in English instead. “I broke my leg” and “he needs to improve his English” are expressed with a reflexive pronoun in Romanian, not a possessive. It’s hard to know whether to use a possessive or a reflexive, and to make matters worse, there are both accusative reflexive and dative reflexive pronouns.
5. When you want to express how you or someone else feels — “I’m hungry”, “you’re hot”, “she’s fed up” — you have to resort to dative pronouns instead of the nice simple adjectives we have in English.
6. Romanian pronouns can change their forms when they interact with other words in a sentence.
7. You use lots of pronouns when you have interdependent relationships with lots of people. I don’t, at least not with people I speak Romanian with, so I don’t. If you’re always talking about other people, perhaps this all becomes second nature.
I’m going to write a series of posts on Romanian pronouns, so I can refer to them later for easy reference, and hopefully I can kill this beast once and for all. At the moment they’re really holding me back.
