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.