Customer Reviews

Beginner's Romanian (Beginner's (Foreign Language))

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I highly recommend this book. It is very inexpensive for the value the reader receives! This book has a lot of vocabulary and many phrases to use if you are travelling to Romania. These include situations in customs, hotels, restaurants, etc. I like being able to memorize common phrases I expect to use.

However, although there is some grammar information included in this book, I have found TEACH YOURSELF ROMANIAN by Dennis Deletant and Yvonne Alexandrescu to be easier and more understandable for learning the grammar.

This book is very good and I have learned a lot from it. However, I recommend supplementing with the TEACH YOURSELF ROMANIAN complete course including the audio tapes.

I found this book to be moderately helpful regarding customs and history of country and culture. From the perspective of learning the language it was virtually worthless. Many conversations are listed, but without direct pronunciation guidelines, so the reader doesn't actually know if they are pronouncing it correctly. It might be okay for reading the language - not speaking it. Additionally the text is printed in approximately 7 point pica and is tiny and difficult to read. I'd advise a "pass" on this one.

As an intermediate student of the Romanian language, this book really doesn't prove useful to the novice language learner. Since it is over sixteen years old, the segments on social/political information is rather dated. Linguistically, the author does not provide a pronunciation guide, which can prove arduous for the beginning learner. If an individual would like to obtain some "fluency" in stock phrases, I would recommend Berlitz Romanian or Education Services Corp. two cassette series. In short, Gall's book is a dated resource with scant grammar or pronunciation information.

This book contains some helpful insights regarding customs and etiquet of the country but is not very useful in teaching the language skilss needed to communicate the type of phrases one might like to know when visiting this country.

This book has a few good facts about the culture, but as to helping you learn the language, forget about it. It doesn't show you how to pronounce the words using English sounds. It just has the alphabet, then pages of scripts that you are just supposed to know from the alphabet. It is very bad for learning the language.