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Complete Romanian
It's easy to teach yourself Romanian!
"Complete Romanian: A Teach Yourself Guide" provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Romanian, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing Romanian with confidence.
Within each of the 24 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues. You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This program also features current cultural information boxes that reflect recent changes in society.
Features: One and five-minute introductions to key principles to get you started Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress Extra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of the basics of the language
"Complete Romanian: A Teach Yourself Guide" provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Romanian, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing Romanian with confidence.
Within each of the 24 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues. You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This program also features current cultural information boxes that reflect recent changes in society.
Features: One and five-minute introductions to key principles to get you started Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress Extra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of the basics of the language
352 pages, Paperback
First published September 24, 2010
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 3, 2019
A perfectly sensible way to learn Romanian—does exactly what you would expect a legitimate course to do, and nothing more but also nothing less.
Compared specifically to Complete Finnish , which I completed (finished) earlier this year, Complete Romanian takes a much more conventional/``old-fashioned'' approach, and is much better for it. Romanian has a good amount of grammar to deal with (though considerably less than Finnish), and this course is up-front about it and does not play coy with declensions or conjugation classes. Every chapter (apart from the two recapitulation chapters) starts with some vocabulary (including genders for nouns, and declined forms for nouns and adjectives), then some grammar, then a conversation and some exercises on that vocabulary and grammar—exactly what you want to see. If there ever is the occasional opaque phrase to memorise (``vă rog'' is an early one), it's specifically returned to later, when the grammar required to parse it is covered.
The only thing that's less good about Complete Romanian is the audio component: though it exists and is just as easily accessible, it was also clearly recorded for the 1992 edition, and though it does still match the text, it's limited by the fact that it had to fit on a cassette—instead of the more than three hours of audio Complete Finnish had, there's ``only'' about an hour, and after the first few chapters you only get one conversation and one exercise per chapter, instead of all of the vocabulary and multiple conversations.
(Another thing that feels off about Complete Romanian is the sidebars with Romanian history and culture that the series likes to pride itself on. Obviously political neutrality is a myth and the history of Romania is more, uh, charged than that of Finland, but it's funny to see the contrast between the bits that were clearly written in 1992, when the authors were strongly anti-communist monarchists, and those added in later editions, when the disastrous economic effects of the post-1989 reforms became too obvious to skirt. There are still a lot of suspicious omissions, though.)
As a language, Romanian is a lot more interesting than I expected it to be—its grammar is a little bit simpler than Latin's, but it didn't suffer the disastrous creolization French did, and retained (and developed!) a lot more interesting features than the other Italo-Western Romance languages. It absorbed a lot of Slavic vocabulary, as well, which gives it a nice AU feeling compared to the Germanic influences on the rest of them.
It's well worth your time, and easy to pick up if you already know Latin, which you ought to.
Compared specifically to Complete Finnish , which I completed (finished) earlier this year, Complete Romanian takes a much more conventional/``old-fashioned'' approach, and is much better for it. Romanian has a good amount of grammar to deal with (though considerably less than Finnish), and this course is up-front about it and does not play coy with declensions or conjugation classes. Every chapter (apart from the two recapitulation chapters) starts with some vocabulary (including genders for nouns, and declined forms for nouns and adjectives), then some grammar, then a conversation and some exercises on that vocabulary and grammar—exactly what you want to see. If there ever is the occasional opaque phrase to memorise (``vă rog'' is an early one), it's specifically returned to later, when the grammar required to parse it is covered.
The only thing that's less good about Complete Romanian is the audio component: though it exists and is just as easily accessible, it was also clearly recorded for the 1992 edition, and though it does still match the text, it's limited by the fact that it had to fit on a cassette—instead of the more than three hours of audio Complete Finnish had, there's ``only'' about an hour, and after the first few chapters you only get one conversation and one exercise per chapter, instead of all of the vocabulary and multiple conversations.
(Another thing that feels off about Complete Romanian is the sidebars with Romanian history and culture that the series likes to pride itself on. Obviously political neutrality is a myth and the history of Romania is more, uh, charged than that of Finland, but it's funny to see the contrast between the bits that were clearly written in 1992, when the authors were strongly anti-communist monarchists, and those added in later editions, when the disastrous economic effects of the post-1989 reforms became too obvious to skirt. There are still a lot of suspicious omissions, though.)
As a language, Romanian is a lot more interesting than I expected it to be—its grammar is a little bit simpler than Latin's, but it didn't suffer the disastrous creolization French did, and retained (and developed!) a lot more interesting features than the other Italo-Western Romance languages. It absorbed a lot of Slavic vocabulary, as well, which gives it a nice AU feeling compared to the Germanic influences on the rest of them.
It's well worth your time, and easy to pick up if you already know Latin, which you ought to.
Displaying 1 of 1 review