Romanian Grammar: A Traveler’s Guide

Hi! Welcome to another one of my language guides for travelers. This time, I’m writing about Romanian Grammar!

It might seem a little bit out of the blue for me to focus on a smaller language like Romanian when my previous posts focused on languages like Spanish, German, and Indonesian. That’s true, but I have a good reason.

I’m going to Romania this summer to teach English informally at a children’s summer camp. While I won’t need to know the language (there’s an interpreter there to help when needed), I would like to know at least the basics of Romanian. This will help me better communicate with the students and to understand any potential tough spots between the two languages.

It’s actually a Romance language, like French, Spanish, or Italian. While researching for this post, I realized how similar it is to Spanish, and how many words I recognize!

In fact, Romanian actually has some grammatical features of Latin that other Romance languages eventually lost.

Still, it’s heavily influenced by Slavic languages, too. It reflects some grammar of those languages, and has some sounds and other pronunciation quirks that come from those. It’s an interesting midpoint between the Romance languages of Western Europe and the Slavic ones of Eastern Europe!

As always, I’ll try to write this in easy-to-understand language, and focus on what you need to know as a traveler rather than as a language learner.

Romanian Pronunciation

Unlike English, Romanian is phonetic. This means that it is pronounced exactly how it’s written.

But, it is not pronounced the same as English. So, how do you pronounce Romanian words?

Well, I try not to use text-based pronunciation guides, since they can end up being inaccurate if you pronounce a word differently. Learning them from the audio is much more accurate and useful.

I’m a big fan of this video from The Romanian Academy on Youtube. It is very clear and simple, and goes over the sounds that match with English and explains the differences with other letters very clearly. There’s a second video that goes over the letters c and g, since they work a little differently, but I’ll leave that one up to you!

Sentence Structure and Word Order

Like I said above, Romanian is very similar to other romance languages like Spanish.

This is reflected in much of the word order, but I don’t want to dwell too long on some things I can cover quickly, so let’s get into it:

• Romanian sentences go in order of subject-verb-object. This is the same as English or Spanish.
• Adjectives and adverbs, unlike in English, come after whatever they modify. This happens in Spanish as well. (There is a special exception to this rule that I’ll get to later.)
• To ask questions, simply place the verb before the subject. Like saying “Finished you your homework?” Make sure to use similar intonation to English (i.e. rising in pitch throughout the question).
• Prepositions work the same way as English or Romance languages. That is to say, we put them in a similar place in a phrase like “I am at the store.”

Pronouns in Romanian

Pronouns aren’t necessarily one of the most important parts of speech to know in their entirety as a traveler. But they’re still vitally important for understanding a sentence. I mean, I’ve used them about four times already just in this section!

Romanian has a lot of pronouns, though. A lot more than English, and more than Spanish, too.

Romanian pronouns account for several different possible roles in a sentence. This is something called a case (a term I won’t rely on here, don’t worry). Their nouns do this too, but it’s not as noticeable so I thought it would be better to leave it out given the goal of this guide.

• I/me = eu, mine, mă, mie, îmi
• You (singular) = tu, tine, te, ție, îți
• He = el, îl, lui, îi
• She = ea, o, ei, îi
• We = noi, ne, nouă
• You (plural) = voi, vă, vouă
• They = ei, ele, îi, le, lor

These pronouns are often left off of verbs, since they change their form based on the subject already.

Possessive Pronouns

So, those are all of the ones that equate to normal sentence usage. But possession is a little different, so I want to separate those out. There’s a lot of stuff that remains consistent between them all, namely the words al, a, ai, and ale coming just before them. For simplicity, I’ll leave those out. Just know that al and a are singular while ai and ale are plural.

• Mine = meu, mea, mei, mele
• Yours (singular) = tău, ta, tăi, tale
• His = lui, nei, ei
• Hers = ei
• Ours = nostru, noastră, noștri, noastre
• Yours (plural) = vostru, voastră, voștri, voastre
• Theirs = lor

Every one of these possessive pronouns has four separate forms using the al, a, ai, and ale mentioned above. All these different forms really do is accommodate the gender of the thing being possessed, but I wouldn’t stress about it too much as a traveler. You’ll be understood even if you make some mistakes.

Oh boy, that’s a lot. I know. Like I said, don’t stress about it too much. I’m just leaving these here so you can make sure you know them all, but it shouldn’t be too bad.

Politeness

Like some other languages I’ve written about before, Romanian has a few levels of politeness. This changes the pronouns used when addressing others. As a traveler, I’d recommend sticking with the more formal pronouns, as they are used when talking to strangers.

Generally, adding dumnea- to the beginning of one of the above pronouns makes it formal. For example, dumneata or dumnealui.

Who?

Questions will come up a lot as a tourist in Romania. Look out for cine, cui, care, pe care, ce, and cărui/cărei/căror. These are generally all different ways of saying “who?” and if you’re not sure which one to use, I would say just stick with cine or pick one. You’ll be understood well enough.

This/That

This is the last one, I promise. But if you’re buying something or asking for directions, these are important words to know.

They’re fairly simple.

• Acesta/ăsta = this
• Acestia/ăstia = these
• Acela/ăla = that
• Aceia/ăia = those

These aren’t even all of the pronouns in Romanian. But unless you’re planning to learn the language I wouldn’t worry about anything beyond this. It’s already a lot to remember.

Contractions

I’m making these a slightly separate category from pronouns only because they extend to other parts of speech.

Like English, Romanian uses contractions. (I’m, we’re, and isn’t are all examples of this.)

There are a lot of them that can be quite complicated, so I’ll just link to a list of them here. They can be pretty common, so it’s good to know about them. The site I linked includes explanations and examples of how they’re used.

Adjectives + Adverbs in Romanian

Adjectives are a little funky in Romanian. And when I say a little, I really do mean that it’s nothing that hard to deal with. In fact, you can generally get by with just identifying the base form of the word.

Adjectives in Romanian (generally) change their form to match with whatever they modify, both to become singular or plural and to match the gender of the noun.

But not every adjective follows these rules. Some have four forms, others three, two, or one. Oranj is a borrowed word and only has the one adjective form.

If you’re looking up these words to understand their meaning, every form is likely to come up. But if you know one form it should be as easy to find the other forms as it is to differentiate between quick and quickly.

Adverbs are pretty simple, actually. The base form of an adjective (that is, the masculine singular form) is simply used to make adverbs. To give an example, if we did this in English we would simply write, “He runs quick” and “He is quick.”

Prepositions

Prepositions describe movement and location. They’re pretty simple in Romanian, but they do change the form of the noun that comes after them. As a traveler, that’s not a super important detail to know, and as long as you know what to look out for you should be fine.

Prepositions come before the noun they refer to, just like in English.

So, what are the prepositions you should know?

• Pe means on or at
• Cu means with
• Fără means without
• La means at
• Pentru means for
• Contrar means against
• În means in
• Sub means under
• După means after

Now, will you need to constantly look at this list? Probably not. You can find them in a dictionary easily, but it’s worth having a basic idea of what they look like.

Dialects

The term dialect is a little weird. For more about why, see my post about it!

But, depending on the criteriab and classification method, there are anywhere from 2 to 20 dialects of Romanian, though it’s now generally divided between just northern and southern. These differences are not extensive, but you might notice some changes in speech between the two areas.

• The southern dialect is the one that became the ‘standard’. So everything I’ve talked about here aligns most closely with the southern dialect. It’s also present in Serbia and Bulgaria. Within Romania, you’ll encounter it in the Wallachia region.
• The northern dialect also extends into several other countries including Ukraine and Serbia. In Romania, you’ll encounter it in Moldavia, Banat, and Transylvania.

Additional Resources

• I put it at the beginning, but for a pronunciation guide, I’d highly recommend this video from The Romanian Academy. Like I said, I prefer not to use text-based pronunciation guides because, without an understanding of the IPA, they might cause some confusion.
• For travel phrases, check out this article from Rolandia. It includes a lot of phrases that could come in handy while you’re in the country.
• For a dictionary that works offline, I’d recommend the Romanian-English Dictionary app. It also includes pronunciation for the words, which can be immensely helpful!
  • Unfortunately, I don’t have access to an Apple device to look for Apple apps. If you find a good one, or can confirm that this one is available, please let me know below!

Review

Let’s quickly review, to make sure you got the main takeaways!

• Romanian sentences are structured just like English.
• Adjectives and adverbs come after whatever they modify.
  • They also use the same word forms.
• Nouns have many additional forms for both gender and number.
• Romanian uses a lot more pronouns than English, but you don’t need to know them all.
• Verbs have many forms, but as long as you know the basic root you should be fine. Make sure you learn the present, past, and future at the very least.
• Prepositions are important for knowing the locations and times of various events.