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. The Text Generator 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. The Conversation Partner talks back. The Translator explains a sentence instead of replacing it, and the Corrector marks what you wrote and says why.

Above the on-ramp sits the Path — a station map from A1 to C2 with grammar, vocabulary and checkpoint stations — and Words & Notes, where everything you save comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule in seven 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.