Customer Reviews

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

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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).

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.

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.

If you buy the book with the cassettes it's not bad. I actually did learn to speak from it. But at least 15-20% of the words are unexplained, and you need a dictionary. I would have never been able learn without the dictionary.
As others say, the book has many errors, but I did not find them critical.
I was unhappy to see two 1/2 hour cassettes with the book. It's disingenuous to make people believing there is more material there than there is.

I find this book easy to understand and easy to learn, especially for a language that is not commonly spoken or even heard of where I live. The dictionary and the verb dictionary are helpful, but it is not very large and you do need to get a separate dictionary. Other then that it was great, the self quizes in the book were nice, especially the answers in the back to check yourself, and it doesn't throw to much at you in one chapter. I do recommend getting the tapes, they help a great deal with pronounciation of words.

Definately recommend buying the book/cassette combination. The fun exercises in the book, careful explanation of grammar, and the helpful pronunciation of dialogues and vocabulary from the tape make it easy to master the basics of this Romance language in almost no time at all. A Must-Get for all those looking to travel to Romania or just wanting to study, with not a lot of time to do it in.

The pronounciation is very accurate, but I wish the tapes repeated the word and phrases more than one time. The speaker speaks very fast and it is not always easy to repeat the words. I would recommend this book and tape set to anyone who has a Romanian to help with the lessons.

I highly recommend this book. It is very informative, yet not too difficult. The grammar explanations are very helpful. The Exercises at the end of each chapter are very helpful for the reader to check progress and discover areas that need further study. There is also very interesting information about Romania and Romanian history found throughout the book. If I had to choose only one book to learn Romanian, this is the one.