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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Dogtanian Diglot Newbie Scotland Joined 6202 days ago 33 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Russian, Greek | Message 17 of 36 23 November 2007 at 6:46am | IP Logged |
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Thank you Fraz and Iversen for the interesting information.
I am a big fan of Kusturica and Bregovic films and music, so for anyone else reading this I second Frazs recommendation, watch "Underground", and "Black Cat, White Cat". They are both hugely enjoyable films with great music. As I have become addicted to "Zdob si Zdub" I also recommend them. Unfortunately it will take a little longer to find out what they are singing about, in the meantime I will just enjoy the beautiful sounds of this language. Iversen: My favourite reading area is medieval-early modern history and have discovered a distinct lack or books on Romania, in English that is. I hope to read some in Romanian in the not too distant future (I am not very patient.). If it is not too facile a question how would you place the difficulty of learning Romanian between, say Greek or Russian and the more conventional Romance languages? Thank you! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6498 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 36 29 November 2007 at 4:30pm | IP Logged |
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As far as I know there is almost nothing written in Romanian before the 1700s. You may find some German texts from Siebenbürgen (=Transilvania), but they are not sympathetic to the 'true' Romanians, - just see what they did to tarnísh the reputation of a nice guy named Vlad Ţepeş, also known as Dracula (Bram Stoker did the rest). And the Turks were not very interested in writing about the Romanian history either. So you will have a hard time finding books in any language about that period in Romanian history.
It is difficult to separate the difficulty of learning Romanian as a language from the problem of finding good dictionaries, grammars and text books. But it is possible to make the following observations: Of course Romanian mostly uses the same alphabet as English (with some additions), but in my esperience it doesn't take long to learn the other two alphabets, - at least not in their printed form. I have chosen not to waste time on learning to decipher handwriting in Greek and Cyrillic, because I know that most of my sources will be printed. So Romanian is easier, but it is not an important point to make. There are lots of French loan words i Romanian which should give an Anglophone no trouble at all (plus all the words inherited from Latin, but often in a somewhat mangled form). In this respect it is much easier than Greek, where most of the words you can recognize are false friends. Russian also has a lot of loan words, mostly from German (at least those that have been adopted before 1900). So in this respect I would say that Greek is the worst of the three. All three languages have much more morphology than English, but both Greek and Romanian have less than German. Russian has a rich morphology, especially for substantives and adjectives, and it has a division of the verbs in perfective and imperfective which is bound to give any learner of lot of trouble (at least I find that aspect troublesome - note the pun!). Greek has a similar division between imperfective forms and aoristic forms, but only as forms of each and every verb. I would say that the Russian grammar is the worst of the three. But even German grammar has its quirks, as you know, and I would guess that learning German from scratch would be almost as bad as learning Romanian, Greek or Russian - in that order. Finally there is the question of syntax and idiomatics. I would say that Russian has given me more trouble in this respect than both Greek and Romanian. But it is also the newest, so my opinion maybe flawed - half a year ago I had as much trouble with Greek idiomatics as I have with Russian now. Maybe I will also wake up one day and find the Russian way of saying things quite natural. Compared to the other Romance languages Romanian would appear to be more difficult. But I suspect that it is due to lack of contact with the language more than any intrinsic factors, - you have certainly heard songs and seen films in several other Romance languages, but probably not in Romanian. Besides the other Romance languages are fairly close relatives, so if you know one the others will be much easier to learn - with Romanian the advantage is not quite as large. If your goal is to learn language families then Russian is apparently very close to the other Slavic langugaes, so here the 'polyglot advantage' is even larger than with Romanian and the Romance languages. In this respect Greek is a complete disaster because it has no close living relatives - only its own dead ancestors. Edited by Iversen on 29 November 2007 at 4:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| armorig Diglot Newbie France Joined 6000 days ago 3 posts - 2 votes Speaks: French*, Romanian | Message 19 of 36 30 November 2007 at 11:40am | IP Logged |
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why have you trashed my post ?
<<Buna ziua tuturor I am affraid you speak all english I don't know anything to this way, puis-je parler en français ou roumain just a litle with english. Sper ca nu va suparati pe mine, j'espère que vous ne serez pas fâchés contre moi, I hope you don't be angry to me ! See you soon Pe curând A bientôt and Kenavo (breton) >> Edited by armorig on 07 December 2007 at 10:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Dogtanian Diglot Newbie Scotland Joined 6202 days ago 33 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Russian, Greek | Message 20 of 36 30 November 2007 at 5:04pm | IP Logged |
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Armorig, I don't think anyone is angry with you, but you are supposed to write in English here, I imagine that is why your post was deleted.
If you want to write in Romanian or French you can go to the "multilingual lounge", I'm sure people will be happy to talk in those languages there. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Dogtanian Diglot Newbie Scotland Joined 6202 days ago 33 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Russian, Greek | Message 21 of 36 30 November 2007 at 5:25pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you Iversen it's incredibly helpful to be able to get the perspective of someone with experience of so many languages.
If I have time to learn both the Romance and Slavic groups completely I imagine I will. One of the things I find particularly fascinating about the Balkans is the feeling of it being a language crossroads, with Romanian having the appearance of a Slavic Romance language, and Serbian/Croatian on the other hand sounding like a mixture of Russian and Italian, though I imagine that is only interesting with a background in the other languages of the groups. I have one more question,this time concerning dictionaries, I have heard that the Levitchi dictionary is the most comprehensive Romanian-English dictionary available and wondered whether you, or indeed anyone here was familiar with it. It seems to be fairly substantial, and naturally, not terribly cheap, so I'm wondering whether it would really be worth squandering my student budget on it... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6939 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 22 of 36 30 November 2007 at 5:35pm | IP Logged |
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There's a three-volume textbook of Romanian, with audio, that starts here. Produced in Moldova, the explanations, vocabulary lists, et al are in Russian, so I don't know how helpful it would be for an absolute beginner with little or no knowledge of Russian. But for someone with a bit or Russian or basic knowledge of Romanian, it looks as if it could provide some useful materials. And it's free...
http://cnt.dnt.md/romint/undp/nivel1.php 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Dogtanian Diglot Newbie Scotland Joined 6202 days ago 33 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Russian, Greek | Message 23 of 36 01 December 2007 at 1:21pm | IP Logged |
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Daristani, that sounds like an interesting resource but I can't get the link to work unfortunately. Does it usually work ok?
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6939 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 24 of 36 01 December 2007 at 1:52pm | IP Logged |
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Dogtanian, I haven't used the materials myself, and so don't know how well the site normally works. I do know that it tends to load slowly. (I have broadband, and use Mozilla Firefox as a browser.) I tried it just now when I saw your message, and the connection timed out. So I'd advise you to keep trying over time, and you may get lucky.
I can't comment in detail on the materials (since I never used them and can't view them at the moment), but it appears to be a very modern, three-volume textbook on the "communicative" model. I don't know how much audio there is, but there are MP3s for each of the lessons. The textbook (and perhaps the site as well) was produced with assistance from the UNDP, as I recall. I just now went into the internet archive to look for it, and came up with this index page, describing the materials: http://web.archive.org/web/20070104190719/cnt.dnt.md/romint/ undp/index.php (It likewise loaded very slowly, but if you can make any sense out of the Romanian text there, it gives a description of the materials. I then clicked on the box for "nivelul 1" in the archive page and it took me to the page for the first volume: http://web.archive.org/web/20070104190436/cnt.dnt.md/romint/ undp/nivel1.php This evidently has 40 lessons; whether or not you can actually get all the materials out of the archive I don't know, but I was able to get the PDF of lessons 1-2, along with the table of contents, amounting to 15 pages. (I didn't try with the audio.) The course is from the year 2003, produced in Chisinau, and volume one is a bit over 300 pages, judging from the table of contents. (The vocabulary starts on page 302.) In any event, I'm sorry that the current site doesn't seem to be up and running well at the moment, but if you keep trying over time, I hope you have luck. Otherwise, you might play around a bit with the archived materials to see what the course is like and whether you could obtain it in that way. In any event, good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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