Learn Romanian

Start at the alphabet

The Romanian on-ramp is written by hand, not generated, and it is 198 cards long. Every card is spoken in a recorded Romanian voice, and what you get right is scheduled for review rather than shown again at random.

• 31letters
• 10digits
• 17pronunciation rules
• 100core words
• 20everyday phrases
• 20sentences

Three of the pronunciation cards, exactly as the course teaches them:

• copil — Romanian never writes its stress, and the stress moves — ko-PEEL, feh-RYAS-truh, ka-FYA, but KAR-teh. There is no rule to learn and no accent to look for, so take the stressed syllable from the audio and store it with the wordfereastră — a window
• mână — one short word holding both vowels English does not have. The â is tight and high — “ee” with the tongue pulled back and the lips flat. The final ă is a plain schwa, the “a” of “sofa”. They are different vowels; merging them into one “uh” is the commonest beginner errormasă — a table
• telefon — no vowel is ever swallowed. English flattens unstressed vowels into “uh” — TEL-uh-fuhn — and Romanian never does: te-le-FON, three clean full vowels. The only schwa in the language is the one actually written ăbanană — a banana

Then material that does not run out

Once you are reading, the level is the point. Make a text writes Romanian at the CEFR level, length, topic and format you ask for, so the step up is a setting rather than a new book. Speaking scores you word by word as you read aloud. Lexi talks back. The Translator fixes your mistakes as it translates and can give a simpler version at your level, and Writing marks what you wrote and says why.

Above the on-ramp sits the Course — a map of practice steps from A1 to C2 with grammar, vocabulary and a level test at the top of each level — and My words, where everything you save comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule in eight quiz styles.

What Romanian actually costs a beginner

â and î are the same tight high vowel — an ee with the tongue pulled back and the lips flat — and ă is a plain schwa. mână holds both, and merging them into one uh is the commonest beginner error. The second cost is the opposite of an English habit: no unstressed vowel is ever swallowed, so telefon is te-le-FON with three clean vowels rather than TEL-uh-fuhn. And because the stress moves and is never marked, the course stores it with the word, on the audio, where it can actually be learned.