Teach Yourself Romanian: A Complete Course for Beginners with Book (Teach Yourself (McGraw-Hill)) [Audio Cassette]

Dennis Deletant (Author), Yvonne Alexandrescu (Author)

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company; 2 Pap/Cas edition (April 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0844202843
• ISBN-13: 978-0844202846
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,804,347 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #24 in Books > Education & Reference > Foreign Language Nonfiction > More Languages > Romanian

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not a good book for self-study, August 4, 2000

By 

Bruce A. Mcclelland (Gordonsville, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Teach Yourself Romanian: A Complete Course for Beginners with Book (Teach Yourself (McGraw-Hill)) (Audio Cassette)

Considering the scarcity of books in English describing the Romanian language, one hesitates to be too critical. However...

I have never studied Romanian before, but I have studied enough languages to know that autodidactic books should be virtually free of errors and should anticipate reader concerns and questions. Unlike some of the other books in the Teach Yourself series, such as the *excellent* Teach Yourself Bulgarian, this book leaves way too much unexplained, and is full of errors of both the typographic and organizational sorts. To be honest, I only got to page 40, but here's a partial list of problems: -- there is no attempt to provide readers without the cassettes with approximations of the sounds of certain letters and combinations; --key phrases are presented that are not used in the dialogues, which are exceedingly short and don't seem to represent much effort; --unfamiliar words are used in exercises or dialogues that are not mentioned in the chapter, much less explained; --unfamiliar grammatical forms (e.g. -ul at the end of a noun) are used without any discussion whatsoever; --there are typos all over the place, even in the "puzzles" --alphabetic ordering in the vocabulary is not self-explanatory; --a major verb introduced in the section on verbal conjugations is not conjugated, and its pattern is not directly inferrable; --references to items "introduced in this unit" which were actually introduced in a previous unit. --aside from verbal conjugation, there is no convenient summary of other morphology in the back of the book Etc. etc. The shame of it is, this book is in its second edition. I would have hoped that someone might have put a little more effort into making this book a lot more reliable for people trying to learn the language on their own. As it is, I'll probably go back to Grigor Nandris' Learn Rumanian for English Speakers, old as it is (1974).

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short and good course, November 23, 2000

By 

Bernard Welter (Utrecht Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Teach Yourself Romanian: A Complete Course for Beginners with Book (Teach Yourself (McGraw-Hill)) (Audio Cassette)

I enjoyed doing the course. The author claims that you will be able to use Romanian as used in daily life. This true for the most but do not expect to be able to translate poems or read specialist articles. Depending on your language background you have to learn a lot more words. This can not be expected from a short course. I am however able to go around in Romania, do my shopping, make myself clear in conversations and not feel totally helpless. This book does not waist time on useless practices. In fact every excercise is usefull and should be taken. It also serves as a very good reference guide on Romanian language after completion of the course. The accompanying tapes have been a great help.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars As good as it gets? Maybe. But that's not saying too much., August 17, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Teach Yourself Romanian: A Complete Course for Beginners with Book (Teach Yourself (McGraw-Hill)) (Audio Cassette)

I concur with the the second reviewer's impressions of this book. The scarcity of books on learning the Romanian language make one appreciate the avaliability of this one, however the quality of this book leaves much to be desired.

The amount of erros in this book is astounding. Some are relatively easy to decipher such as when the book translates the Romanian for "a great problem" to mean "a great professor." Since the Romanian word is "problema" it doesn't require much brain-work, so it's suprising the editors didn't catch it by the second edition. However, it mistranslated great in a bad sense or "heavy" to mean great in good sense in the English. This may throw off the novice, the person the book is afterall, intended for.

I just completed a drill and checked the back of the book for accuracy and found I had apparently answered one wrong. Turned out I was right but the author's of the book made up a variation of word in the answer key.

There are too many careless errors in this book like the ones I site above.

Plus, the authors really are unclear in too many cases about the complex grammar of Romanian. I was on a ship recently, and met a Romanian, who explained to me in less then 2 minutes about an essential law of grammar the book never clearly explains. I am advancing by using this book and it is teaching me to speak the Romanian language but I often find myself thinking how I might be able to be advancing, if the book was free of typographical erros and anticipated the basic questions it's readers would have.

Bottom line: I'm glad this book is avaliable, perhaps it's the one that's best for you to use, perhaps not...but this is only because of the low quanity of books on the subject. The authors and editors of this book have a lot of work to do.