My Progress in Romanian After a Month + Video

So it is more than a month. If I am serious with my C2 goal at the end of summer, there should be already some progress visible. I have not mentioned it before, but a huge inspiration for this blog was the blog of Benny, the Irish Polyglot: http://www.fluentin3months.com/. One of his advices for language learners is to make videos. So I made one. I know I did not post a video in the beginning of my trip, so you cannot really compare, but still, here you are. A video of me speaking Romanian:

I can hear how many mistakes I made. Mistakes are good, because I can learn from them. There are English and Romanian subtitles available. In Romanian subtitles, some of the mistakes are pointed out.

In what state was my Romanian one month ago and how is it now? Before, I would describe my level as being able to make myself understood. I had problems with grammar (personal pronouns in dative and accusative, for example), plurals. My vocabulary was not something fancy either. The area in which I improved after this month is vocabulary. On the other hand, I did not advance in grammar almost at all. I did not put much time into it. There are things like Romanian imperfect or past conditional that I want to get better at.

There is also a big difference in the quality of my speech, depending on if I speak in the aquapark, or talk to somebody above a beer. In the park, there is a loud music and if somebody jumps at me and starts speaking Romanian with a strong Italian accent, it is hard to catch everything at the first time. On the other hand, if I can speak for longer intervals of time, in a dialogue, my Romanian sounds much better. I go into a more advanced vocabulary and there I get a little stuck, but it is still better than exchanging a few sentences over the loud music in the park.

I know I need a bigger vocabulary, so that I can catch more keywords when listening to somebody, which will, in turn, lead to less requests to repeat the sentence for me. So I read and look up words I do not know. I feel that I am missing longer dialogues, as the work in the park takes a lot of my time and I have to decide between reading, revising the vocabulary, or going to talk to somebody. And I think that watching more TV in Romanian, or listening radio in Romanian would help. I will try to find a balance between these sources of language training.

And at the end, a song, which I usually put in the beginning, but now I put there my video. This lyrics of this song I learned by heart. Another excellent way of learning vocab. But more about that in one of my next posts.

România - 5 Likes and 2 Dislikes

Romania. What is the country like? What is good and what is weird for me? Some of the things I mention here will be a specific comparison with Slovakia/Czech Republic, so keep that in mind while reading this post.

What I like about Romania

Opening hours

There are so many shops with the basic groceries everywhere. And they close at 21:00 the soonest! A fifth of them are non-stops, so if you decide to buy yourself a chocolate in the middle of the night, no problem. The Czech word "Večerka" (a shop open in the evening, some of them only until 19:00) sounds so funny compared to this.

Food

Mămăligă, brânză, ciorbă ardelenească, salată de icre. All delicious pieces of Romanian cuisine. And of course: semințe (roasted, salty sunflower seeds)—my addiction, because of which I came to Romania.

Semințe, salată de icre and white Romanian bread

Shaking hands

People really do shake hands here when they meet. Every day. I love it.

Romanians know how to drink

Although the streets of Romanian cities are sometimes full of pieces of paper, cigarette buts and so on, you will not find any single puke on the sidewalk. People do not need to get drunk to unconsciousness to have fun.

Appearance of the restaurants

An example of a restaurant in Constanța

This might be specific only to the seaside, but the restaurants and pubs have beautiful seats in various shapes. They look interesting, each is different. A big contrast to the dull average look of a Czech or a Slovak restaurant.

What I did not get to be fond of in Romania

Fițe

This hardly translatable Romanian word means something like snobbish. Guys with bald heads, big arms and big bellies that try to look like mafia way too hard. Blond girls with 10 cm high heels. And Mamaia, the most famous resort here is for these people no longer a place to have fun, but to show up. They are not a majority, but they are still very visible.

Bread

This will be very Czech/Slovak specific. Actually, compared to the rest of the world, the Romanian bread is not that bad. But there is nothing in the world like freshly baked, heavy loaf of Czech/Slovak dark bread. I found pâine de vatră ("bread from oven") and it comes very close to CS bread, but it's still too light, still too much yeast.

Among other (more liked than disliked) things I have to mention: Girls and guys dress up here. When they go out, they always dress nicely, girls put make-up on. I was suprised, when Izabela, one of my newly acquired friends from the dorms put pretty clothes and make-up even for a late-evening walk on the beach.

I met very stupid people and I met very open and helpful people, just like everywhere else. All in all, I like it here. So far, it seems to me, that Romanians complain less, then people in Slovakia, where complaining is a national sport. They are used to the fact, that they must help themselves if they want to live better and they are willing to work hard for it.


Questions? Put them in the comments!