Hurray for Simon and Schuster!

Simon and Schuster is finally releasing a Level I Comprehensive collection of lessons for the Romanian language! To be released this June! Hurray!

This is great news for me since, my wife being from Romania, I've always had a bit of a hankering to learn the language. Romanian is not exactly a popular language (like French or Spanish), which makes it almost impossible to find any good materials.

The Pimsleur method is by far the best, possibly because you can learn a language without doing too much work. I picked up their Romanian "basic" pack (10 lessons) a few years ago and was very impressed. The idea is to listen to Romanian (or whatever language) speakers every day for 30 minutes, and after a while you start picking it up. Since you learn by listening (and repeating) instead of reading, you supposedly won't develop much, if any, of an accent. I've been told that what little I speak is more or less without an American accent. Although to be honest, I probably would have more of an accent if my (Romanian) wife wasn't there to laugh at me when I said something wrong. Heh.

A while back I thought it might help to listen to one of the Romanian translated recording from VoGR. But there was a bit of a problem - I got into the sermon and wanted the translator to hush up so I could hear the sermon uninterrupted! Even more disconcerting was that the translator sounded just like my brother-in-law! What a second... it was my brother-in-law, Dorel! That was kind of neat and distracting at the same time. Also, he can speak Romanian like a machine-gun; 832 syllables a minute. Or something like that.

So nope, I'm not at all proficient in the language, by any stretch of the imagination, which really becomes evident around my wife's family. They think it's funny to bring up the infamous "tortoise" incident, for some reason. One must be very careful when one says broasca ţestoasă around Romanians! Very careful indeed.

I took 2 years worth of Spanish in High School, and another two years in College; the last two classes were entirely in Spanish, so I feel reasonably qualified, having studied another Latin-based language, to say that Romanian may be one of the most confusing languages (other than English itself) on the planet. One of my Romanian books I have actually says that some of the Romanian vowel sounds cannot be accurately described on paper (in English; I understand there's a whole language-thingy linguists use to describe phonetic sounds on paper, but that's way out of my league).

In other words, to speak it properly, you need an authenticate Romanian to listen to guide you. And laugh at you when you mess up.

So thanks Monica. :-)

Also Sam, Willy, and especially Lavi. Y'all are all very effective laughers.

You too Irina. :-)

And I'm waiting, Simon and Schuster.