Romanian: A Complete Course for Beginners (Teach Yourself) (Paperback)

by Dennis Deletant (Author), Yvonne Alexandrescu (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Complete language courses that span the globe!

From Danish to Spanish, Swahili to Brazilian Portuguese, the languages of the world are brought within the reach of any beginning language student. Learners can use the Teach Yourself Language Courses at their own pace or as a supplement in their formal courses. These complete courses are based on the very latest learning methods and designed to be enjoyable and user-friendly.

Prepared by experts in the language, each course begins with the basics and steadily promotes the student to a level of smooth and confident communication, through:

• Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues
• Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and exercises
• Step-by-step guides to pronunciation
• Practical vocabulary
• Regular and irregular verb tables
• Plenty of practice exercises and answers
• Bilingual glossary The new editions also feature:
• Clear, uncluttered, and user-friendly layout
• Self-assessment quizzes to test progress
• New recordings on CD for easy access and review
• Website suggestions to take language study further

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Dennis Deletant is Professor of Romanian Studies, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London.

Yvonne Alexandrescu taught in Romanina for 20 years. She now teaches Romanian to corporate and government sectors.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company (March 1998)
• Language: Unknown
• ISBN-10: 0844200395
• ISBN-13: 978-0844200392
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,090,685 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A complete, easy to use language course, March 18, 2000

By	K. Hansen (Columbia, MO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I decided to learn Romanian because my grandmother was from Romania. She tried to teach me the language before she died, so the learning process has been a personal experience for me. This book has been great because it is very well organized and has really helped me along.

The pronunciation guide was very detailed, and the tapes are even better for learning pronunciation. It's not very hard, anyway -- similar to Italian. Each chapter is organized around a central theme or question, with the vocabulary derived from the theme. The grammar sections are pretty good. They don't try to give you too much grammar in the beginning, and build on what you've learned gradually.

Overall the book is geared a more to the tourist than to the student who wants to learn the language for knowledge's sake, but that's pardonable. Not many people attempt Romanian unless they are going to go there! The book is a valuable first course in Romanian, whether you're a veteran of foreign language study or this is your first attempt at a second language.

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quirky but pretty effective, June 14, 2005

By	Christopher Culver - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Teach Yourself Romanian Complete Course (Paperback)

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.

23 of 24 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: Complete Course (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).