Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Romanian (Teach Yourself Book & CD)

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This book is a wonderful guide to grammar and vocabulary. I continually use it as a ready reference to check conjugations, declentions, &c. Organised into twenty-odd units, each part expands on the previous unit, and each new sample dialogue builds on everything learnt cumulatively, thus keeping the pupil actively practising the language.

In addition to grammar, the book contains short articles on the Romanian people, their history, culture, and religion. It is very informative and explains in the early units how one might get along in Romania if on a short vacation. However, all the information is there should one want to learn the language in far more depth.

The only caveat to this book is that if one wants to truly learn the language and the principles of pronunciation especially, the tapes are not optional. The book does not spend too much time explaining pronunciation and unlike Spanish, there are no hard and fast rules for the stresses applied to syllables. Without some form of audio assistance, learning the Romanian language (like any other languages) is nearly impossible.

As of 2007, there are very few Romanian Learning softwares or books on the market. From my experience, and I've bought a lot of them, this is the BEST.

It really teaches you as a beginner all the basic stuff and advances through the language. It tells you about colloquialisms, subtle and big differences in grammar and sentence structure, it really goes over everything. Plus it has nice little sections on Romanian culture/history to read about.

I have also bought the "Before You Know It" software: [...] And I found that using this software is great to make lists of the vocabulary presented in this book. It helps you learn it a lot easier.