Romanian

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Romanian

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I am an American who lives in Romania and I have been studying the language is many ways, I came a cross Lingq a a while ago and I have been doing it a lot (it has become my main language learning activity). I have the aspiration to learn other languages like German and I have noticed that it has a lot of material compared to the Romanian, which makes sense because it is so much more popular of a language, but, I am wondering if there is a way for the Romanian language to get more material. Or, if anyone has tips on how to import things that would be beneficial to learning.

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Look for online newspapers, online magazines, youtube content with Romanian subtitles, ebooks, wikipedia articles (wikipedia can be found in numerous languages). Wikipedia

Use the lingq import browser extension and import these.

Even in languages that have quite a bit of material, in my opinion, one should still be looking for content on their own. That way you will be finding things that are of interest to you and not relying on what may already be imported by someone else…you may not find what someone else imported particularly interesting.

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Hi, I’ve studied a bit of Romanian here on LingQ, got to 35k known words, but put it on ice due to time constraints.
Finding LingQ-appropriate content has indeed been a challenge. There isn’t much to be found in the library, what’s worse, the beginner content provided by LingQ suffers from audio issues and is (imho) unusable. Even my normal go-to resource Youtube is basically dry. But once you are a bit more advanced, the situation gets better, ebooks and audiobooks are fortunately available.

How did I go about studying Romanian on LingQ? Disclaimer: I don’t really recommend doing this, but maybe you want to try it out regardless.
Every day I would import a couple of articles from Adevărul, from the “News Feed” on the LingQ library page, then I used the Microsoft Edge browser’s inbuilt text-to-speech function (click on print lesson, then activate the “immersive reader”), this way I got an idea how this language might sound like. Since I had already studied some Romance languages, the articles were more or less comprehensible for me; depending on your level, you might have a different experience. So I just turned on the audio and read along.

Another option might be to reverse the process and create transcripts from let’s say a podcast. But here again, the experience is probably worse than for other languages. First off there aren’t many providers that support Romanian and secondly the quality is potentially worse than one is used to in major languages. I have tried https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/ and the results were so-so, but I might try this again in the future.

As for other content, I have uploaded the Gospels and the book of Genesis, not sure if that is your cup of tea: Login - LingQ
The complete Bible is available of course, if you’re interested follow the links in the course description.

I have also listened to quite a few hours of radio broadcasts from radio Europa Liberă, especially those concerning the events of 1989. See: Podcast - Europa Liberă România (RFE/RL)
Some have transcripts. I have shared a selection here:
Login - LingQ
Other courses I can recommend:
Login - LingQ
Login - LingQ
Login - LingQ

If you are comfortable with the above, you are probably ready to start reading books, if that is what you want. I personally like the works of Lucian Boia, a historian, he has written many short non-fiction books which are not too difficult. Fiction however is still a bit too hard for me, so I can’t really comment on that. I have listed some books I have read on LingQ here: Login - LingQ

Hope this helps.

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Thanks for the tip on the MIcrosoft Edge immersive reader. The voice for German sounds really good. It does seem to get “stuck” a bit, but otherwise pretty nice.

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Thanks, I will have to try those. I will read the Bible eventually in Romanian, I am just not at the level yet if you get what I mean.

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