Shadowing Practice: Language Review: Romanian - Learn English Speaking with Video

Good morning friends and good to see you in a new episode of Language Review on OTV.

My name is Indragostit Lulia de Limbi and I am from the United States.

Today we will discuss about the Roman language, otherwise formerly known as Russian-Italian,

Numenumenese, Moldovan, Draculan or gender fluid Latin.

This is episode 19 of Language Review, a series where I go through the languages of the world and review them, sort of like a film critic or a video game reviewer.

And at the end of the video, I'll give them an official rating from Dogwater to GigaChad on the Simp scale.

Before we begin, to support me and join my exclusive language learning community, check out my Patreon.

There are dozens of extra videos there, and we do weekly vocab challenges that I'd love for you to be a part of.

If you enjoy this video, let me know which language you'd like me to review next in the comments, and without further ado, hi sign Chippin.

Romanian?

I love Rome!

It's so beautiful!

It's my dream to visit that city!

Yeah, Rome is great, so naturally, so is Romanian.

Romanian is mainly spoken in Rome, which is the capital of the Italian country of Italy.

Ah, Rome, the most beautiful city in all of Europe.

Just look at this architecture and urban planning.

Wait, is that L'Arc de Triomphe?

Is this Paris?

No, this is Bucharest.

Bonvenit in Rai.

Romanian is mainly spoken in Romania, a country that looks like a fat potato chillin' in southeastern Europe.

And this place is criminally underrated.

Romania might just have the deepest and most interesting lore of any country.

From Vlad the Impaler, to communism, to dictatorships and revolutions, they've had it all.

They build their roads like Mario Kart tracks, their castles are humongous and the real Dracula lives in one of them, and then their parliament building is ginormous.

The dictator built the heaviest building in the world just to flex.

But the people didn't like him that much, so they, uh, made him stop being a person.

And they aired it on TV on Christmas.

And to this day, the building is still 70% empty.

I really want to visit Romania to see the city of Cluj-Napoca, which is arguably the most beautiful and modern city in all of Eurasia.

And everyone in Cluj has really jacked legs, because you can ride the bus there for free in the city if you do 20 squats in front of a camera.

I wonder if it scans you and sends all your data to Palantir.

But seriously, I've always thought Romania is so cool.

Even just the name oozes aura, like Romania, sounds like a fairy tale.

And then Transylvania is a region there.

What a fancy word.

It's like Pennsylvania.

Romanians are Chads.

I mean, they even have the same flag as the country of Chad.

I actually used the Chadian flag in the thumbnail.

Did anyone notice?

Then Romanian is also spoken in Moldova, but it depends who you ask.

The name of the language in this country is very controversial.

It was called Moldovan over there until 2013, when their highest court ruled that Romanian is the official language of Moldova.

But the NPCs there do not agree.

According to the 2024 Moldovan census, more people claim to speak Moldovan there than Romanian, by a decent margin.

But the Moldovans I talk to seem to be ready to go to war to defend calling it Romanian.

Regardless, Moldova is another very underrated place that I'd love to immigrate to.

Their capital, Chisinau, looks interesting, and they have gorgeous scenery.

But their biggest export is the greatest song of the 21st century, Dragostai Dente, otherwise known as the Numa Numa Song.

But I prefer to call the language Transnistrian because it's also spoken in the rogue breakaway state of Transnistria,

which is a little noodle of land between Ukraine and Moldova that is not an internationally recognized country yet.

But honestly, if you ask them, I'm not even sure they want to be a country.

These guys still think they're a part of the Soviet Union, even though they're technically in Moldova, and their government still officially calls the language Moldovan.

And Slava Domnului, here in Freedomland, we have over 150,000 Moldovan-speaking NPCs, who are all professional hide-and-seek players, because I swear I've never found one.

I know there's a big debate in Moldova on if y'all should join the EU, or cozy up to Russian, or even unite with Romania, but hear me out.

Come join us.

We'll put you next to Florida to keep you warm.

Moldovan's also spoken as a minority language in nearby countries like Bulgaria,

Hungary, Serbia, and Ukraine, and there are big immigrant communities all over the place in Western Europe.

So with over 24 million NPCs speaking the language natively, learning Romanian will unlock you barely any DLC at all.

Probably because unlike the other romance lingos, they didn't colonize everyone.

Being a fan of Romanian feels like being a fan of an artist before they get famous.

One day Romanian's gonna be a global language, so now is a great time to learn it.

Yeah, I'll pass.

I'm afraid of the Balkans and Slavic languages are hard.

Well good news, it's not Slavic.

It's actually a romance language.

Okay, fuck you.

Romanian is kind of an oddball.

It's the long-lost brother of the other big romance languages like Mexican and Baguette.

They were quintuplet orphans who were separated at birth.

These guys were all adopted by stable middle-class suburban parents

while Romanian was adopted by the kind of chaotic yet fun unstable parents who got a fiery divorce.

Divorce?

Divorce!

She took the house, she took the kids.

So nowadays, this language survives over there in isolation, and it's pretty darn impressive that it holds up

while surrounded by Slavic lingos on all sides and whatever the heck Hungarian is on its left flank.

So Romanian evolved separately from its brothers and was influenced by other nearby languages, and it kind of turned into this gnarly Slavic romance fusion.

So Romanian's got the best of both worlds.

They're lucky people.

They literally have everything.

A hybrid language, tasty sausages, cow stomach soup, and Romania even has some of the fastest internet speeds in the world.

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Now back to Romanian.

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Now let's talk about dialects.

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Thankfully, the Romanian language doesn't have crazy diverging dialects that will make you rip your hair out like Arabic or German.

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They used to have more dialects, but communism.

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You know, communism.

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But the biggest divide you are gonna encounter is, of course, Romanian-Romanian versus Moldovan-Moldovan.

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Standard Romanian is based on the Bucharest variety of the Wallachian dialect found in southern Romania, and this sounds neutral and is what you'll hear in the news and textbooks.

106

Romanian-Romanian in general sounds a bit harsher with stronger consonants, and it feels more Western European with loanwords from countries where leaders are democratically elected.

107

Then Moldovans speak Chinese Romanian.

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In Romania, they use a lot of che-che sounds, but the Moldovans often replace these with sh-sounds.

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Like they literally have a phrase, sh-she, which sounds suspiciously a lot like the way this white boy thanks his Filipino waitress at Denny's in Mandarin.

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I've also had Romanian NPCs tell me that they perceive Moldovan speakers the same way that us Americans would hear Irish people.

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They're definitely speaking the same language, but you gotta sit straight up and lock in a bit to understand.

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Moldova byla chest you sovietzkeva sojuza, so they use an abundance of Russian loanwords that aren't common in Romania.

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This is second nature to these Moldovans because monogii z nich govriet pa ruski.

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But in general, NPCs from both countries can understand each other pretty well.

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There are still smaller regional dialects, but linguists can't agree on anything,

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so in general, people in Transylvania are like Americans living in the south with a southern drawl.

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Then speakers of the Banat dialect in Western Romania leaking into Serbia have more of a Yugoslavian twang.

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But honestly, you're just gonna learn standard Romanian unless you run off and marry a man in a small town in Romania.

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So now it's time to talk about the writing system.

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Romanian is written in a modified version of the American alphabet with 31 letters instead of the original cast of 26.

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And that's because they have an additional 5 characters, which look like other normal letters in the alphabet, except these guys have cute little bonus features on them.

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Firstly, in addition to the normal A, they've got two extra A's with little symbols on top of them.

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The naked A makes the ah sound, like in father, while the A with a bowl on its head makes a relatively normal moaning noise, uh, like in about.

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Then the A with the traditional Vietnamese cone hat on top makes a much gnarlier, deeper moaning noise, like uh.

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It reminds me of uy in Russian, but not quite.

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It's more eww.

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And then the last letter with the hat is this I with the cone on top.

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And this makes literally the exact same noise as the A with the cone hat.

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Eww.

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Yeah, they make the same sound.

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They're redundant.

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It's stupid and I do not like that.

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Apparently they use the A when it's in the middle of words

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and the I when it's at the beginning or end of a word.

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So technically the uppercase A cone hat doesn't exist.

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I better not see it in the comments.

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It's banned.

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They should just use one letter and since they're in Eastern Europe, just embrace the multi-ocular O.

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That thing oozes aura and would boost tourism.

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Numanumanese also has two letters that are furries with tails coming out of their butts.

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They're not tails!

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They're commas!

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Don't mislead your audience!

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Oh crap, I forgot!

145

Those are definitely not tails!

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Many fonts to this day mess that up and make them look like attached tails, but there's really a gap there.

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If you accidentally connect it to the S, it'll look like a Turkish letter, and you know in that region of the world there's so much beef and drama, they don't want to be mistaken for Turks.

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They'd rather be mistaken for Hungarians.

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Oh yeah, that'd be fine.

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Romania and Hungary are best friends.

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Anyway, the S with the tail makes the sh sound, and the T with the tail makes the tz sound.

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Pretty useful letters that definitely simplify writing.

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The rest of the alphabet is not going to give you a hard time.

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The writing system is easy.

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Unless you go to Transnistria where they use the Russian alphabet to write.

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Honestly, it's pretty dope seeing a Romance language written in Cyrillic.

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I speak French, Spanish, and Russian, so seeing this breaks my brain and feels immoral.

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The entire country of Moldova actually used to write in Cyrillic until posly raspada Sovietzkova sajusa when Western democracy,

159

na-na-na-boo-boo, came and ruined everything.

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But compared to the Cyrillic they used up until the middle of the 1800s, this current script is some neutered dog water.

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They used to have glorious, ancient Cyrillic characters like these hundreds of years ago.

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My favorite being this spider, known as the Big Yus, which used to make that U sound that the cone hat A and I sadly represent in 2026.

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Yeah, those letters are definitely going to be the hardest to pronounce for learners.

164

Like the word in in Romanian is in.

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Well, that's convenient.

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But the I has a hat on it, so it's un, with that deep grunt at the front.

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Learners also have troubles with the letter C in this lingo.

168

If it comes before A, O, or U, it makes a hard K sound, like KASO But before an E or an I, it makes the CH noise,

169

like in CHE But if you put an H in between them, now it gets hard again, like K.

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And the pesky G does a similar thing, turning from a hard G noise in GUSTE to a soft J noise like in GJRAFA.

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I wonder what that one means.

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BULLEA.

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This stuff is really easy if you already speak pasta, because the Italians copied the Romanians and do the same sort of thing.

174

So how does the Romanian language sound in general?

175

Well, to the monolingual beta, it just sounds like Italian.

176

In fact, if you close your eyes and pretend you're American, you'll probably think it's Italian.

177

Hey Tony, I'm from Italy!

178

But for the distinguished listener, it sounds more like Italian and Russian met at a bar, went home together, and had a baby.

179

And the baby then grew up with a special interest in his distant ancestors from the Roman Empire.

180

You'll constantly be asking yourself, Am I listening to Russian, or did I time travel back to 20 AD, Or am I just in Minas Gerais?

181

Because you'll often hear words like Foame and Tarzio, which sounds so freaking Brazilian to me.

182

In general, Romanian is gorgeous.

183

It is a beautiful mixture of so many things, but it comes together to still have its own unique identity.

184

And it is genuinely one of my favorite languages to listen to on the planet.

185

I find it so elegant, prestigious, and attractive, even when giant hairy men speak it.

186

And Romanian music is just, oh my goodness, it is amazing.

187

For such a small number of speakers, they have musically mogged the entire universe.

188

I love the genre called manele, which is like traditional Romanian party music.

189

I'm especially a fan of Nicolai Guta, whose song A Opta Minune Alumi is straight fire.

190

It makes me so happy to listen to.

191

And then, of course, the greatest song ever written in the history of mankind, I had to take my hat off just to say this,

192

is the song by the Moldovan pop group Ozone, known as Dragosteidinte.

193

Please sing along with me.

194

Ugh, this language just has such a dynamic range.

195

You'll hear beautiful, whimsical, girly words like vresa plec, followed by dark, twisted, thick words like dragoste,

196

which looks and sounds like dragon.

197

But it actually means love.

198

I swear this language makes me feel like I'm in Skyrim sometimes.

199

They won't shut up about dragons and the words look so emo and gothic.

200

Like, look at this word.

201

I guess my brain registers these accent markers as piercings that a Hot Topic employee would have.

202

Romanian is so metal.

203

And then the Slavic influence in their vocab is awesome.

204

One of the first words you'll probably want to learn in this language is hello.

205

Nah, that's useless.

206

Let's learn chainsaw, which is družba in Romanian.

207

But družba means friendship in Russian.

208

What?

209

And then to say friendship in Romanian, you say prietnie, which is also extremely Slavic.

210

But the most mind-blowing thing is that to say yes in the Romanian language, you literally say da.

211

That is the king of Slavic words.

212

But don't forget, this is a romance language, so now let's look at the Latin influence.

213

Cum.

214

Cum means how, and this has to be the most Latin-looking word I've ever seen.

215

You'll hear many words and expressions with cum in this language, like oricum, precum, and nicicum.

216

Really, the majority of words in the language have a Latin origin.

217

Like intensitate, which literally sounds more Italian than the Italian word for intensity, which is intensità.

218

And they often even say merci for thank you, just like the Frenchies.

219

But ironically, some of the phrases that come straight from Latin still sound really Slavic to me, like buna ziwa, which is an important greeting meaning good day.

220

You're kidding me, ziwa isn't Slavic?

221

And then they have my favorite way to say and in any language.

222

They say she, which just sounds so crisp when sandwiched between two nouns, Bolsonaro, She, Lula.

223

The personal pronouns are very romance-y, and I especially love that they have the same word for I that the Brazilians use.

224

Except in Romanian, it's more like, While in port, it's like,

225

But warning, the you formal pronoun is the most insane thing you will see this entire year.

226

How do you go from the simple, informal tu, to dumnea vostra?

227

It literally sounds like a Skyrim shout to summon the undead and if someone called me that, I'd be checking my flank for dragons.

228

And then a lot of random words are different between Romania and Moldova, especially food vocab for some reason.

229

A Romanian is likely to say pepene verde for watermelon, but a Moldovan would say harbus.

230

Then a tomato in Romania would be roxie, but in Moldova, they might say patlágica.

231

I don't eat fruits nor vegetables, so I don't really care about that.

232

And the last thing I'll say about vocab is that Romanian speakers love to talk about this town in Croatia.

233

They always say the name of the city, and I don't know why.

234

It's confusing.

235

But do you know what else is confusing?

236

Romanian grammar.

237

Making plurals is annoying, because there are like a billion different ways to form them that seem very frustrating, because you just gotta memorize them all.

238

Look at these.

239

How does om turn into oameni?

240

But at least this is the most socially progressive language on planet Earth.

241

For starters, it has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, which is weird for romance languages.

242

But what makes this lingo such a pioneer in social progress is that nouns can change their gender when they're made plural.

243

The singular indefinite articles are un for masculine nouns and o for feminine ones.

244

So a boy is unbayat, while a girl is ofata.

245

And then a neuter noun behaves like a masculine one in the singular.

246

So a hotel, even though it's neuter, is un hotel.

247

But here's where the magic happens.

248

If you want to say two of each of these things, you say, Doi baietzi, because doi is the masculine version of two.

249

Doa fete, because doa is the feminine version of two.

250

And then doa hoteluri, which also takes the feminine form of two.

251

But wait, it used the masculine article before.

252

The word hotel got on HRT and transitioned between the singular to the plural form.

253

I'm an ally.

254

I support that.

255

And the definite articles are pretty crazy too.

256

For the singular articles, the masculine one is ul.

257

Then the feminine one is ah.

258

And the neuter again copies the masculine in the singular.

259

But the crazy part is that these definite articles are attached to the ends of nouns, just like in Swedish.

260

So the boy is bayatul, with that ul attached.

261

Then the girl is fata.

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And the hotel is hotelul.

263

When we go to the plural forms, we use e for masculine nouns and le for feminine ones.

264

And then again, as you can clearly see, our neuter noun hotel is now a woman.

265

I honestly love this stuff.

266

But unfortunately, Romanian has five cases.

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Yeah, five cases.

268

You heard that right.

269

If you don't know what a case is, maybe you should keep your innocence.

270

Basically, it means that nouns can change based on their purpose in a sentence, like, for example, if it's the subject, the direct object, or the indirect object.

271

So the five Romanian cases are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and vocative.

272

But slavobogu, for most Romanian nouns, the nominative is the same as the accusative, and the genitive is the same as the dative.

273

These are the forms of the boy in each case.

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They're really not too difficult, just some slightly different endings you'll need to learn the patterns of.

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Then the girl uses slightly different endings, but it'll be chill, I promise.

276

There are three additional forms for each noun when they're plural, and knowing how to decline one noun of a certain gender into each case does not mean

277

that you'll know how to do it for other ones.

278

Just like in Russian, there are many different endings that nouns can take in all the cases,

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which, without a doubt, makes Romanian the hardest major Romance language to learn.

280

And there are a ton of verb tenses, but if you're already familiar with Mexican or spicy Mexican, None of this is going to surprise you.

281

They have four different conjugation groups depending on the endings of the infinitives.

282

So a-lucra, for example, means to work.

283

Yeo lucrez, tu lucrezzi, el lucrezza, and so on.

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There are a lot of irregulars, but that's just a normal romance language thing.

285

Thank Dracula they don't borrow verbal aspects from Slavic languages.

286

That would be horrible.

287

I think the most noteworthy and potentially pain-inducing thing about the verbs is that they use the subjunctive tense way too much.

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And that's because they connect verbs in a unique way in Romanian.

289

In other Romance languages, you often say I want plus the infinitive.

290

So the I want part is conjugated, but the infinitive is not.

291

But in gender-fluid Latin, you have to do I want plus the subjunctive conjugation of the first-person singular.

292

So to leave in Romanian is a pleca.

293

Then to say I want to leave,

294

it's vrau sa plec, which is I want plus the subjunctive marker plus the subjunctive first-person singular conjugation of aplica.

295

But to say you want to leave, now both verbs agree with you singular, and it becomes vrei sa plec dar numanumaye.

296

So now it's time to talk about shock factor.

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How will native Romanian speakers react to you speaking their language as a foreigner?

298

Well, if you walk up to a Romanian expat in the US or Europe, and you say something to them in Romanian, they're probably going to be confused.

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They'll ask, why on earth did you waste your time learning our tiny and irrelevant language?

300

Have you not heard of Spanish?

301

Then when you tell them, because I like the Numa Numa song, they're legally required to perform the entire ballad for you.

302

But seriously, not a lot of people learn Russian-Italian, so native-speaking NPCs will be quite bewildered when you tell them you're learning it.

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They'll be delighted to hear you making an effort, even if you only know simple phrases like Buna Ziwa and Mutsumesc.

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But if you speak decent, conversational Romanian to them as a foreigner, they will do backflips.

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They aren't gonna combust mid-backflip like the Chinese, or insist that you take their house and all their possessions like Arabic speakers, but they will repeatedly flip,

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invite you into their homes, and give you Sarmale.

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I could talk about gender-fluid Latin for 89 hours, but you've already heard enough,

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So it's time for me to give the Moldovan language an official language simp certified rating on the simp scale.

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On a scale of dog water to gigachad, I place Romanian solidly in...

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The gigachad tier.

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Ever since I got into language learning, I have always been fascinated with Romanian.

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It's spoken in such an interesting and underrated part of the world that I'd love to immigrate to.

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And it sounds heavenly in the most gothic, dragonian, tough, yet flowy way imaginable.

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It's truly such a bridge language between East and West, but it comes together and has such a unique identity that oozes aura.

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Romance languages are popular, but everyone ignores the fifth most common one, so you would be such a Chad if you studied it.

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The grammar can get a little toxic, but imagine how rewarding and satisfying it would be to speak Russian-Italian one day.

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If you do the math, Romanian speakers only account for less than half a percentage of the world's population.

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So this language does not unlock you a lot of DLC, but that's precisely why natives will appreciate your effort so much.

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I strongly, strongly recommend learning Romanian, and I will definitely learn it one day.

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And don't forget to click the link in the description

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and sign up for CyberGhost VPN to take advantage of their best deal ever

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and protect your browsing with a very trusted VPN.

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And a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters.

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Without y'all, I'd probably still be a monolingual beta male.

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You guys make videos like these possible.

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And I just appreciate it so much, and we have such a fun time on Patreon.

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Mulțumesc for watching, and la revedere!

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