Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Romanian Complete Course Audiopackage

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I first visited Romania to hear the speech of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, but quickly became fascinated with the Romanian language. There are few options for English speakers to learn Romanian, but in exploring three of them I found TEACH YOURSELF ROMANIAN to be the best value and pretty effective, as after merely a year of very casual study I can live comfortably in Cluj and interact with the locals without fear.

This course is very soundly based on what you will actually hear in the street. Colloquial forms are taught well before their written-language equivalents, such as the future tense in "o sa..." and the ending -spe for numbers 11-19. This is the book to get if you intend on arriving in Romania very soon and don't plan on reading literature for a while yet. After new grammatical forms are introduced, the authors provide a lot of repetition to let the new information sink in. The back of the book contains a helpful list of verbs fully conjugated in the present indicative along with their principal parts. The dialogues are usually amusing and interesting, and the book is full of cultural notes explaining the complicated history of that part of Europe, although their descriptions of modern Romania are already behind the times. Cassettes can be obtained with the book. They seem helpful though I have rarely used them since I am generally surrounded by Romanian speakers.

There are a few drawbacks to the book. The author strangely thinks that Romanian does not have stress. In fact, he says Romanians emphasise each syllable of a word evenly, when they simply don't. As a result, the stress of vocabulary is not indicated, except in the table of verbs in an appendix. One must therefore invest in a good dictionary that marks stress. These are usually cheap, try Suteu and Sosa's DICTIONAR ORTOGRAFIC AL LIMBII ROMANE which doesn't give definitions but marks stress and tells how a given noun forms its plural.

Another failing is that the construction of the genitive and when to use "al/a" is left very vague, and students would do well to ask a native speaker about this facet of the language. There are some typos as well, but not more than in the usual Teach Yourself publication. One rather odd aspect of the book is the negative tone of some many example sentences. Illustrating grammatical points with bits like "There were more than 2000 corpses there", "The eggs in the market are never fresh", "No matter how much you try you won't succeed", and "He was as stupid as he was ugly" gives a rather morbid tone to the book. And of course there's a slanderous dialogue in chapter seven that will make the student think Romania is a third-world country where all hotels are falling apart.

I should mention that in addition to this book one should obtain a reference grammar. If you read Spanish, the work ESQUEMAS DEL RUMANO published by the Centro de Linguistica Aplicada "Atena", Madrid is cheap and quite portable. A real dictionary will be useful too, since the glossary here doesn't even include all words used in the book; try anything published by Theora. And, of course, the key to learning Romanian is frequent interaction with its speakers, so practise, practise, practise. But though you will need additional resources, obtaining TEACH YOURSELF ROMANIAN is a good first step towards this fascinating Romance language.

I found this book as rather doing a disservice to both the reader and the Romanian language. It uses mostly old, formal and awkard forms of conversation, unusual gerundial verb modes (like it's been translated from english!) and a constant choice of using suffixes that distort words making them seem difficult. Overall, it unrealistically pushes the language away from its latin base instead of using that base as common ground for a reader of a different language.
I must say however that I have not read other similar courses out there so I could not make a fair comparison..

My intentions in purchasing this book were to review and learn some new vocabulary. I had lived in Romania for several months so picked up quite a bit there. I wanted to enhance my skills and fill in the holes. Despite many of the reviews, I purchased this book anyway because of its price. After completing it, I'm very pleased with it. The chapters are loaded with information. The book is not a complete course but goes over all major topics.
The most important thing you can get from this book is learning the Romanian language pattern. Romanian, like most languages, is just pattern memorization and this book is great at guiding you though that as well as the exceptions to the pattern. This book does an excellent job of setting you up with a good framework to continue learning.
My only complaint is that I wish the answers to the questions in the back came with a small explanation. Frequently I would get an incorrect answer and not really understand why. Happy learning!

I am writing this in response to the "Romanian linguist" who apparently thinks the only way in the whole world to learn a foreign language is from a native linguist. This is, of course, not so. This specific does have its share of mistakes and misprints, such as "put" instead of "putt". And I can infer from other reviews that some of the language is archaic. The book "Discover Romanian" is much bette, And you can get a full set of CDs for it for only $%50, in addition to a workbook, and a bilingual guide, but not here on Amazon. Do a websearch. This seems to be the best available. If you find where it is sold, you will also find the dictionary this "Romanian linguist" thinks is a 'trade secret'. If everyone needed a foreign linguist to teach them a foreign language, few people on Earth could speak a foreign language. This is not so.
I have found Romanian grammar quite difficult, and a native speaker always helps, especially one who really knows the grammar, but this does not need to be a linguist-just someone ho knows the grammar. Some Romanians do not even know that they need to put a dash in between these two words: Scusati-ma. There is also a complete free Romanian grammar available on the web, that has grammatical points many Romanians do not even know. Do a web search and you will find it. And this is written by a linguist, in linguistic fashion. It is difficult, but all the grammar you would ever need to know is included.

I bought this book before moving to Romania, because I was hoping to get a bit of a foundation. For awhile I did my best to work through the lessons, hoping that I would be able to learn from them.

However, I found one very definite problem with this book (aside from some of the things mentioned by others such as typos and now-outdated examples). The grammar was hardly ever explained in any thorough way. For example, Romanian has different ways of conjugating verbs that end with -i. The book just gave the different ways this is done without giving any hint about how you can know when one conjugation is used, which one is more common, or anything. Even if the authors had stated, "There is no way to know; you just have to memorize this for each verb," that would have been helpful. Unfortunately, there was nothing like that. Another example is the way that nouns are pluralized. The authors don't give any hint about which are the most common endings, how you can tell which pluralization form is likely to be used with which word, the fact that most foreign nouns entering Romanian but still in their foreign forms become neutral and take the -uri plural (CD-uri, email-uri, etc.), and various other things that are helpful.

I know that this is something that may not be such a big issue for some people. My experience in learning and teaching foreign languages is that most people tend to have a bent towards either vocabulary or grammar, and in one of those two areas they tend to excel more than they do in the other. I happen to be a grammar sort of person, and so this was a very big deal to me. In fact, it was enough that I wasn't able to complete all of the lessons because I couldn't figure out the grammar rules well enough to feel like I was learning anything (because those rules weren't generally stated very clearly in the text). I'm still giving it 2 stars instead of 1 because those who focus more easily on grammar will have an easier time with it, and because it does have useful reference tools in the back.

When I first started learning Romanian on my own, I thought this book was very useful, and I'd still say it is if you just want to memorize a bunch of phrases without learning why they're constructed the way they are or how to contruct original sentences. But after taking two years of college Romanian, I'm horrified by this book's lack of grammar explanation (Romanian grammar is quite complex and requires clear explanations for English speakers). The book helps you memorize common sentences, but in fails to prepare you to speak Romanian outside of a script. Also, there are so many typos I want to scream. Typos in the English text, in the Romanian text, in the dialogues, even in the exercise answer keys. I can't recommend it.

I wanted to post a partial response to an earlier review which is fantastic in its breadth but I feel misstates one particular part. The reason I mention this is that comment in particular was a reason I almost didn't buy this book. It made the author sound unreasonable and illogical.

It is odd that this reviewer states "In fact, he says Romanians emphasise each syllable of a word evenly, when they simply don't." Which is not true. There is a point in the beginning that says some words are evenly stressed. But throughout the first and second chapter there are numerous quotes discussing the various stresses and what they mean. This comment by the reviewer relies on a single sentence in the book and audio which I believe is extended beyond its apparent meaning.

On a negative note towards the book, however, I don't understand why each new Romanian word doesn't have a pronunciation guide to that word. You only have individual letter and letter combo pronunciation, not word specific. How can a language book exclude this? The CD helps a little, but I was hoping to get more out of the written book.

This book reminded me why I failed so miserably to learn foreign languages in school: because they taught out of books like this one. You get a seemingly random onslaught of bits and pieces of the language, and there is no effort to deliver it to you in a way that enables you to learn. I suppose a good langauge teacher could make use of a text like this, but for self-study it is useless. The audio discs are even worse. They merely zip through a list of words at blinding speed without any context or pauses. It's the only way to be sure how to pronounce anything you find in the book and the effort of trying to start, stop, and sift through the audio material is not worth it. Lame, lame, lame!

I am more than halfway through the 30 lesson Pimsleur Romanian course, which actually works well, so far as it goes. I was hoping I could use this book to supplement near the end, then continue on after lesson 30, but after about 40 pages, it looks doubtful. If I had picked this "Teach Yourself" course first, instead of Pimsleur, I wouldn't have made it that far, and would still be sitting here thinking I was incapable of learning a new language. Bad language instruction is like a plague in the US, and this "Course" is more of the same.

So far, Pimsleur and the Eurotalk computer programs are the only materials I've found worth even a penny.

It is a good book for people like me who desperately need material; however it's not great for learning Romanian thoroughly.

It's worth the money but it has a few obscure phrases and not enough that I would like to learn. It is a good book but not a 'one stop shop' for learning Romanian and other resources would be required

When I decided to learn a little bit about Romanian, I had a hard time finding good resources. I was very apprenhensive about getting this book because I've used other books in the "Teach Yourself" series, and they are for the most part very mediocre. And most of them don't even teach the language in a logical order.

This book, however, does teach Romanian in a logical manner. (If you're wondering what I mean by logical order, here's why: I have "Teach Yourself Hindi," and it's extremely hard to learn the language because it teaches things at random.)

I would recommend using this book with "Romanian Dictionary & Phrasebook" by Mihai Miroiu. You should also practice your pronunciation with a native speaker.

Brandon Simpson