New Beta Language: Romanian

I posted a similar message earlier, and shared it with my LingQ friends, some of which are Romanians, but nobody answer. I had an exchange of views with aharapu, the most active Romanian-speaking member, but he said he wouldn’t like to “work for free” (since he doesn’t care about earning points).

I’ll do the translations, because I want to help. If I get some points in return that’s an extra bonus. I understand that a certain number of points can be used to pay for my subscription. I guess that would be a nice way to save some money :slight_smile:

Not particularly interested in learning Romanian but glad to see Mike work so hard to get something he wanted accomplished! It just goes to show how well of a community we have here at LingQ. Now the hard part! Finding someone to record Romanian materials! Good luck, and now I see why every language isn´t available here on LingQ (Yet). Thank you Steve for providing such a wonderful site, and responding to the request of its users!

@watupboy: Thanks for your nice message. Finding new material for LingQ was a challenge for most beta languages, not just for Romanian now. :slight_smile:
My next challenge is getting 1,000 votes for Catalan!

mikebond, I may record some lessons, but I feel I need some more proper equipment to do this, as my current microphone is quite awful.
In the meantime, this
http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/pdf/stand_alone_romanian.pdf
is (as far as I can tell) a really good book on Romanian (grammar, phonology, etc).

Ok, Titus. I hope you will get a new microphone soon. :slight_smile:
The link you wrote doesn’t work for me. :frowning:

I updated the link in my previous post, and linking once again here. (some redundancy shouldn’t hurt)
Book on Romanian, written in English:
http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/pdf/stand_alone_romanian.pdf

tototitus. Wow, a great resource. Thank you. If you are able to record any of the many example sentences, over time of course, and provide the English in the translation that would make for great lessons. I am a little concerned about copyright issues however. BTW where do you live?

I think in this case concern over copyright might be superfluous - I don’t think anyone holds copyright over some example sentences, though in our copyright-paranoid times, anything is possible. Like, the most often used example sentence in Romanian is “Ana are mere” (Anna has/holds apples) - how could one possibly clench this sentence within the confines of copyright? By extension, how can one possibly hold copyright on sentences like:
“Îl caut pe profesorul de matematică.” (I’m looking for the math professor.)
“Îl caut pe profesorul Gheorghiu” (I’m looking for professor Gheorghiu.), page 34, the direct object preposition “pe”.

I’ve noticed that the DexOnline Romanian-Romanian has been mistakenly marked as an English dictionary.

Also the German hallo.ro dictionary links to English entries.

The DexOnline dictionary is full of useful information incuding conjugations and etymology of words. It has not been mistakenly marked as an English dictionary. We don’t have Romanian as an interface or dictionary language.

The hallo dictionary is not ideal. If you have other dictionaries to recommend please let us know.

Steve, why do you think the hallo dictionary is not ideal? I find it better than other online dictionaries. The only small issues I am having with it is that it always opens on the Romanian-English tab, although I had selected Italian as my target language. Could this be fixed?

The hallo dictionary is not ideal.

It’s not what I am talking about.

LingQ shall use Deutsch Rumänisches Wörterbuch | Rumänisch Deutsches Wörterbuch | hallo.ro as the German URL pattern, but it uses English Romanian Dictionary | Romanian English Dictionary | hallo.ro instead. Just something to fix on LingQ’s side.

Eugrus. Thanks. Alex will get around to it eventually. How many German speakers are studying Romanian? If setting this up for each language is a lot of work we may not do anything. Remember Romanian is an unsupported language. As it is I am having to create most of the content so the library does not look too empty, and of course I am studying Romanian.

Mike, the hallo dictionary seems to offer a long list of possible translations, some of which seem totally irrelevant. I miss my Seznam Czech dictionary.

BTW, it almost appears as if I am the only one active in Romanian, both in terms of LingQing and in terms of adding content to the library. And you wonder why we don’t want to add more Beta languages.

If setting this up for each language is a lot of work we may not do anything

Probably not. There are only 4 languages on hallo.ro and that is basically copy&paste a URL for each of them.
But I wonder why not just enable users to add their personal dictionaries like in ĹŴŤ, so that developers wouldn’t be bothered by such kind of things at all.

Eugrus, I have no idea what is involved in enabling users to set up their own dictionaries and will find out. However, most learners don’t know where to look for dictionaries, therefore we prefer to set up dictionaries for all users, based on requests that we receive.

Mike, the hallo dictionary seems to offer a long list of possible translations, some of which seem totally irrelevant.

That is 'cause it’s actually an English-Romanian dictionary. For Romanian-English it just searches in the entries supposed to be used inversely.

I’ve got exactly the same problem with this vorbar (словарь): http://www.moldovenii.md/ru/lexicon/d_lang/ru/d_lett/М/tr-from/ro/tr-word/vorbar
In this example the correct translation is there, but appears as the sixth line.

Still, if nothing else, it would be good to add it as a Romanian-Russian dictionary.
Also, having Wiktionary on the list could be helpful just as always.

I will ask Alex to look at these dictionaries on Monday. Thanks.