Teach Yourself Romanian

My intentions in purchasing this book were to review and learn some new vocabulary. I had lived in Romania for several months so picked up quite a bit there. I wanted to enhance my skills and fill in the holes. Despite many of the reviews, I purchased this book anyway because of its price. After completing it, I'm very pleased with it. The chapters are loaded with information. The book is not a complete course but goes over all major topics. The most important thing you can get from this book is learning the Romanian language pattern. Romanian, like most languages, is just pattern memorization and this book is great at guiding you though that as well as the exceptions to the pattern. This book does an excellent job of setting you up with a good framework to continue learning. My only complaint is that I wish the answers to the questions in the back came with a small explanation. Frequently I would get an incorrect answer and not really understand why. Happy learning!

I first visited Romania to hear the speech of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, but quickly became fascinated with the Romanian language. There are few options for English speakers to learn Romanian, but in exploring three of them I found TEACH YOURSELF ROMANIAN to be the best value and pretty effective, as after merely a year of very casual study I can live comfortably in Cluj and interact with the locals without fear. This course is very soundly based on what you will actually hear in the street. Colloquial forms are taught well before their written-language equivalents, such as the future tense in "o sa..." and the ending -spe for numbers 11-19. This is the book to get if you intend on arriving in Romania very soon and don't plan on reading literature for a while yet. After new grammatical forms are introduced, the authors provide a lot of repetition to let the new information sink in. The back of the book contains a helpful list of verbs fully conjugated in the present indicative along with their principal parts. The dialogues are usually amusing and interesting, and the book is full of cultural notes explaining the complicated history of that part of Europe, although their descriptions of modern Romania are already behind the times. Cassettes can be obtained with the book. They seem helpful though I have rarely used them since I am generally surrounded by Romanian speakers. There are a few drawbacks to the book. The author strangely thinks that Romanian does not have stress. In fact, he says Romanians emphasise each syllable of a word evenly, when they simply don't. As a result, the stress of vocabulary is not indicated, except in the table of verbs in an appendix. One must therefore invest in a good dictionary that marks stress. These are usually cheap, try Suteu and Sosa's DICTIONAR ORTOGRAFIC AL LIMBII ROMANE which doesn't give definitions but marks stress and tells how a given noun forms its plural. Another failing is that the construction of the genitive and when to use "al/a" is left very vague, and students would do well to ask a native speaker about this facet of the language. There are some typos as well, but not more than in the usual Teach Yourself publication. One rather odd aspect of the book is the negative tone of some many example sentences. Illustrating grammatical points with bits like "There were more than 2000 corpses there", "The eggs in the market are never fresh", "No matter how much you try you won't succeed", and "He was as stupid as he was ugly" gives a rather morbid tone to the book. And of course there's a slanderous dialogue in chapter seven that will make the student think Romania is a third-world country where all hotels are falling apart. I should mention that in addition to this book one should obtain a reference grammar. If you read Spanish, the work ESQUEMAS DEL RUMANO published by the Centro de Linguistica Aplicada "Atena", Madrid is cheap and quite portable. A real dictionary will be useful too

Deciding what to buy for basic Romanian is a mess. There seem to be 3 overlapping texts out there by the same author, Dennis Deletant. It's unclear whether they are sold with or without casettes. Anyway, this book is very good. But the third edition of the 'Colloquial Romanian' by the same author has more material for those wishing to learn more. The material of the teach yourself book is somewhat humorous, colorful, quite doable. The cassettes have 1-2 texts per lesson only, and both cassettes last only about an hour. There should have been only one with more tape in it.

This book is great, a wonderful help in studying Romanian. I am a missionary to the countrym and have sought out as many books about Romanian as possible. I have asuggestion for anyone who goes there: Buy your Romanian laguage books in-country. There is a great selection of English/Romanian laguage books and CDs in places like Galati, Bucuresti, Brasov, Braila, etc. Another excellent resource is ... It offers a set of 5 CDs (Romanian/English) and an HTML format companion "book" for only ..., and that includes shipping and handling, as well as tax. The English is in an electronic "voice", forcing you to focus on the Romanian being spoken. The HTML document offers *COMPLETE* verb tables, companion reading for the cds, and a grammar guide. Worth the buy!

I decided to learn Romanian because my grandmother was from Romania. She tried to teach me the language before she died, so the learning process has been a personal experience for me. This book has been great because it is very well organized and has really helped me along.The pronunciation guide was very detailed, and the tapes are even better for learning pronunciation. It's not very hard, anyway -- similar to Italian. Each chapter is organized around a central theme or question, with the vocabulary derived from the theme. The grammar sections are pretty good. They don't try to give you too much grammar in the beginning, and build on what you've learned gradually. Overall the book is geared a more to the tourist than to the student who wants to learn the language for knowledge's sake, but that's pardonable. Not many people attempt Romanian unless they are going to go there! The book is a valuable first course in Romanian, whether you're a veteran of foreign language study or this is your first attempt at a second language.