First Romanian Reader for Beginners: Bilingual for Speakers of English (Graded Romanian Readers)

by Drakula Arefu

The book consists of Elementary and Pre-intermediate courses with parallel Romanian-English texts. The author maintains learners' motivation with funny stories about real life situations such as meeting people, studying, job searches, working etc. The ALARM method (Approved Learning Automatic Remembering Method) utilize natural human ability to remember words used in texts repeatedly and systematically. The author had to compose each sentence using only words explained in previous chapters. The second and the following chapters of the Elementary course have only 29 new words each.

134 pages, Paperback

First published September 5, 2014

Reviews

[Brian Thomas Troy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is divided into short texts (starting off very short, then getting longer) following the adventures of Robert and David in San Francisco (though why the stories are set there, of all places, rather than in Romania or Moldova is a bit of a mystery). The stories are written in Romanian with a parallel English text, which I found handy, handier than having to look words up in a glossary or something. I've heard people criticise the book because it doesn't tell you anything about Romanian culture and because its humour is not of the most sophisticated kind. I think, however, that we need to accept it for what it is. It's a beginner-level graded reader, and there are precious few Romanian graded readers out there. (Indeed, I haven't come across any apart from this series and Arefu's other books.) Beggars can't be choosers!
The online audio is, I think, AI-generated, but I don't think that matters too much in the early stages of learning.

[Nicholas Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am very slowly trying to learn Romanian and picked this book up as a different way to try and get to grips with the grammar and vocab. I found the book surprisingly easy reading with the stories quite funny, albeit at times somewhat surreal. Without doubt the process has improved my comprehension of the language and the audio that can be downloaded from the website is a major bonus. For anyone learning Romanian I would not hesitate to recommend this fantastic learning tool.

[Tim Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rubbish. Full of typos. I'm a beginner reading a book for beginners. I shouldn't need to be spotting mistakes but they're all over the place. It turns out that there's audio accompanying the book; you wouldn't know because it's not mentioned at all.

The only reason this is getting two stars rather than one is because it at least provided me with some Romanian to read. If there were any competition, then it would rightfully deserve the lowest mark awardable.