Customer Reviews

Colloquial Romanian: A Complete Language Course (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It is not often that, when a new edition of language course is published, it is actually much worse than the previous one. Unfortunately, this course is one of those exceptions. I'll briefly outline why you'd be much better off with the earlier edition of Colloquial Romanian by the same author.

1. Help with pronunciation. In Romanian, any syllable of a word can be stressed. In almost all Romanian courses I've seen, this syllable is market to help the learner get the pronunciation right. It was marked in the earlier edition of Colloquial Romanian but for some strange reason it has been droppen in this edition.

2. Vocabulary lists. In any good language course, each new chapter contains a vocabulary lists of all the new words in that chapter. That was the case in the previous edition, but not so in this one. There are still vocabulary lists in each chapter, but they are very short and arbitary.

3. Grammar. In the earlier edition of Colloquial Romanian, the Romanian grammar was described in a detailed yet very user-friendly way. In the new edition, there aren't many explanations and they are likely to be confusing for the beginner.

In short, this book is more mysterious than any detective store. I have no idea why the author decided to downgrade his own book to this extent. The one improvement made is that the conversations are more up to date and relevant in this course. If the author would have made those changes but kept the pronunciation help, stuck to complete vocabulary lists and maintained the same grammar explanations, this would have been the best Romanian course on the market. Now, it's not only a rather useless course, it's a course that's much worse than its own previous edition.

It is a very good book covering all the structures to live in Romania, and now to travel. It contains all the grammar, verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, etc. It lacks only the useful vocabulary to travel as how to buy tickets to catch a train, how to find out an address, to get a taxi an so forth.
I recommend this book to all who want to acquire romanian language to a full level. The tapes are good, except for the fact there are only three different voices (and two of then of old people. The young people have better voice!).
The glossary is not complete. The book has about 1.300 words.
It is a good purchase.

While there are not many books on the market to learn Romanian, Colloquial Romanian is one of the better ones. Grammar is easily explained, and one can learn much from the dialoques. New grammar is introduced inside the dialogues, so that one can understand the grammar easier. This is great book; however, one the best tools to learn a lanague is Pimsleur. I highly recommend Pimsleur language courses.

This is ok, but you will probably need a tutor. My Romanian tutor found this book to be very difficult for someone with no experience with Romanian. It also lacked exercises until the end of the book. I feel there was alot of useless vocab and grammer (ie "fairytale" grammer). If you are just travelling to Romania, don't worry, most people under the age of 35 will know at least some English. If you are serious about learning Romanian, this book is useful.

This is by far the best beginner's course out there. The book assumes no previous knowledge of Romanian and does a great job providing both essential vocabulary and fundamental language structures and functions. Hope the authors will write the intermmediate course in the near future.

The book comprises a lot of useful vocabulary and grammar information. However, the authors should have spent time by adding the pronunciation of every word. They do explain how every letter is pronunced at the beginning of the book. Yet it is very difficult for a beginner to have to go back and remind himself the sound of every other letter in a word.

Most of the Romanian language books I've purchased (college textbooks and travel guides) focus on the things you might need as a tourist. These books also favor a formal form of speech that you seldom hear when speaking with the average Romanian (though they'll certainly understand the formal version). When I saw the title of this book, I thought it might emphasize "conversational" Romanian, the kind friends might use. The fact that it didn't was a bit disappointing. Still, it is a good introduction to the language and will help me catch a train, stay at a hotel, find my way around, go shopping, or eat at a restaurant ... all very valuable lessons.

The Kindle version drops all accented Romanian characters in the text, making it impossible to pronounce and learn the words correctly. In the scanned paradigms the accents are there, but the type is so small as to be illegible, and cannot be enlarged.

I can't assess the accuracy or effectiveness of this course yet, but I gave it a good rating based on certain criteria.
First. I have long used Linguaphone courses. I have always found their standards to be the best in language courses. They don't produce a course in Romanian, but they do recommend this one. That influenced my decision to buy it.
Second. A good and effective language course has to have conversational speech in the language by native speakers. These can be variable. The old US military language courses were done on 78rpms or tapes in the 40s or 50s. Unscrupulous producers of language courses were able to buy that old [stuff]and repackage it pretending they had a decent language course in such exotic languages as Telugu and Tibetan and Albanian. The sentences were ok but the actual phonic reproduction was muddy and garbled. They are a complete ripoff. They weren't rerecorded nor even "cleaned-up", and they're still being touted as acceptable language courses.
This course has good clear recordings, with the desirable option of cassette or CD. So for these reasons I feel this course warrants five stars.

I was so excited to get this book and start on the task of learning some Romanian. However, I found it to be very unhelpful. There is almost no guidance on the tapes for pronounciation. The book does provide useful vocabulary and grammar lessons, but what good are they if no one will understand you when you speak?