Learn Romanian by speaking it

Romanian is the Romance language nobody expects. It sits in a Slavic neighbourhood, keeps a case system its cousins dropped, and yet a French or Italian speaker can read a menu and guess half of it. For an English speaker the vocabulary is more familiar than it looks, and the sounds are where the work is.

The vowels, and the consonants the spelling hides

Two vowels do most of the damage, because English has neither. ă is the relaxed vowel of “about”, and â and î, the same sound spelled differently by position, are a tighter central vowel with no English match at all. They are not incidental: casa and casă are two different words.

Then there is the softening. C and g turn into “ch” and “j” before e and i, so cine is “chee-neh”, and Romanian writes a silent h to hold them hard when it needs to, in che and ghi. And two comma-under letters, ș and ț, carry the “sh” and “ts” sounds, the second of which Romanian will happily put at the start of a word where English never would: țară.

Why the tutor hearing you is the point

Your audio goes to the model directly rather than being transcribed first, so pronunciation and pace are part of what it responds to. That matters here because the tell of an English speaker in Romanian is not grammar, it is the vowels: reducing the unstressed ones to a schwa, the way English does automatically, when Romanian holds every one at full value. A transcript cannot see a schwa where a clean vowel belonged.

Stress is the other unwritten thing. It is not marked and not fully predictable, so it is learned word by word, and getting it wrong is the kind of error that only surfaces out loud.

What a session is

Unscripted conversation with something you can interrupt, backed by an authored CEFR syllabus of 333 items from A1.1 to C1, of which 113 are capabilities: concrete things you can do rather than grammar points. What you keep getting wrong shapes later sessions with nothing to configure.

The five tutors span the country, from the standard Muntenian of Bucharest to the crisper Transylvanian of Cluj, the sing-song Moldavian of Iași, and the easy western cadence of the Banat, so your ear meets more than one Romania.

Going to Romania

Travel Mode reshapes the app for a trip: rehearsal before you leave, one real-world mission a day while you are there set in the city you are in and pitched at or below your level, and a debrief with your tutor afterwards. Order something, ask where something is, then come back and talk through how it actually went.

The five Romanian tutors

Every language has five, each from a different place and each sounding like it. You can switch whenever you like, and the app remembers where you are regardless of who you talk to.

• AndreiBucharest

  Clear standard Muntenian Romanian, the national norm, evenly paced and easy to follow.

• IoanaCluj-Napoca

  Clear, slightly crisper Transylvanian Romanian with clean vowels and an unhurried delivery.

• ElenaIași

  Soft, melodic Moldavian Romanian with a gently palatalised, sing-song lilt.

• RaduTimișoara

  Clear western Banat Romanian with the open, easy cadence of the multicultural west.

• MihaiBrașov

  Bright, clear central-Transylvanian Romanian with an upbeat, open rhythm.

What English speakers usually find hard

These are drawn from the pronunciation patterns the tutor listens for in Romanian. Because it hears your voice rather than a transcript of it, they are things it can actually notice and work on with you.

Two central vowels English does not have

ă is the relaxed vowel in "about", kept clean and never dropped; â and î are the same sound, a tighter central vowel with no English match, like an "ee" said with the tongue pulled back. They are real distinctions: casa, the house, against casă, a house.

c and g soften before e and i

Before e or i, c becomes the "ch" of church and g the "j" of jam, so cine is "chee-neh" and geam starts like "jam". Elsewhere they stay hard. To keep them hard before e or i, Romanian writes a silent h: che and ghi are "keh" and "ghee". The spelling hides the sound, so a transcript cannot show you missing it.

ș is "sh" and ț is "ts"

The two comma-under letters. ș is the "sh" of ship, and it contrasts with plain s: peste, over, against pește, fish. ț is the "ts" of cats, said as one sound and, unlike English, freely at the start of a word, as in țară.

A rolled r and five pure vowels

The r is trilled, the tongue tip vibrating behind the teeth, never the soft English r. And like Spanish and Italian, the five core vowels stay short and constant. English glides the o in "go" toward a w; Romanian holds it as one steady sound.

Stress is lexical, so it is learned with the word

Romanian does not mark stress and does not fix it by rule, so it is stored per word, most often on the last or second-to-last syllable. Collapsing the unstressed vowels into a schwa, the English habit, is the clearest giveaway, because Romanian keeps every vowel at full value.