I moved to Berlin in January 2020 and all the fun I was having there was quickly ruined by something that seems like it is here to stay for all of us. From March on, Covid forced us to work from home and left me without something to do in the weekends.
I had been concentrating on my German and Russian (I lived in East Berlin, where I had plenty of opportunities to speak to Russians and other people from ex-USSR countries), but now I had the time and the energy to put some serious effort into Romanian.
I visited Romania in 2017 and 2019 and immediately fell in love with the country. The language seemed much easier than other Eastern European ones, so I put it in my list of things to do.
“Yeah, Romanian must be quite easy right? I heard it’s very similar to Spanish.”
I’ve heard that phrase many times since then, when I mention learning Romanian. It’s partially true. Let’s take a look:
“Mi nombre es Mikel y soy del País Vasco. Tengo treinta y un años.” (Spanish)
“Numele meu este Mikel și sunt din Țara Bascilor. Am treizeci și unu de ani.” (Romanian)
There are some similarities, indeed. But even if it is a Romance language, Romanian has also been influenced by Geto-Dacic, Slavic, Turkish and other languages that never had any contact with the Iberian peninsula. Consequently, for a native Spanish speaker, Romanian is nowhere near as easy as Portuguese, Catalan or Italian. Not even close. It’s doable, but it requires time and hard (and smart) work.
The Process
My main language learning tool was once again Steve Kaufmann’s excellent LingQ website. It has a fantastic series of Mini Stories you can use to learn the basics in any language. Usually, I usually recommend reading and listening to them over and over again until you memorize each one of them, but I was feeling motivated enough to quickly power through them and move on to the actually interesting stuff:
I uploaded some books on Romanian history on the website: Vlad the Impaler, Dacia, Romania in WW2, Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship… That’s the secret: The content needs to be interesting enough to make you continue reading while the language not being so hard that you get tired quickly. If I was learning Russian or Japanese, I wouldn’t have been able to do it this way.
Once we were allowed back into the office in June, I had to change my approach to adapt to my schedule. The daily 50 minute commute from Lichtenberg in the East to the Spanish Embassy in Tiergarten became my main Romanian learning time. That alone gave me an hour and a half of listening time. Add some more listening while cooking, eating and working out, and you get 3 or 4 hours a day.
My ability to understand written and spoken Romanian quickly improved. But in order to be able to speak, you need to practice speaking. Luckily, in the era of Smartphones and Internet, you don’t need to have native speakers around you to be able to get some practice. The best way to start speaking, in my opinion, is reading aloud. It allows you to say things in the language you’re learning, without fear of embarrassment nor having to find a speaking partner. Make sure to pay attention to the pronunciation while listening though.
At some point, you will want to have actual conversations. What I did was go to Italki.com and find a native Romanian speaker who wanted to learn Spanish. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very consistent, for various reasons. Therefore, I decided to hire a tutor and get weekly practice. Paying for it has significant advantages, the main ones being that you are sure the speaking partner will show up and that you can spend the whole hour learning the language you want to learn, instead of speaking half the time on your own language. Doing this from the very beginning, as some so-called polyglots suggest, is not something I would do. I always recommend learning the basic vocabulary and grammar first, and getting used to saying things by reading them aloud and even speaking to yourself. To each their own, though.
Conclusion
Romanian was my 2020 lockdown project, and it went quite well. In September 2020, I had a job interview with the German-Romanian Chamber of Commerce. Although not at the level of my German, my Romanian did sound convincing.
I was successful because I applied the lessons learned during my previous language learning:
- Plenty of listening time, at least 2 hours a day.
- A lot of reading of interesting content, sometimes aloud, sometimes while listening.
- Frequent conversations, but only after learning the basics through input.
- Occasional grammar lessons for troubleshooting.
Some useful links: