Limba Română

So I felt like doing different blog posts based on particular subjects to tell people what life is like here in Moldova. Since I just got back from having lunch with some classmates in my Romanian class, I feel like this is a good time to talk about what Romanian is like as a language. I don't know when I first got interested in Romanian, but it's something I always wanted to try learning. As a Romance language it is similar to languages like Spanish and French, but I feel like it's often forgotten about since it's not in Western Europe. That's probably why I first got interested in it because I like to learn things and visit places most people don't think about.
I think it's pretty remarkable that it was able to survive as a language while being surrounded by Slavic languages in Eastern Europe. Those languages have definitely had an influence on the Romanian language though. For example, "Da" is yes in both Russian and Romanian. Also another word for German is nemțesc which comes from the Russian word for mute apparently. I guess there was an enclave of German speakers near Russia that never spoke Russian so mute became synonymous with German. Obviously, that is not a great term to use now so Romanian speakers have switched over to german to mean German. I played a Romanian music video for a Polish friend and they thought it sounded like some weird form of Russian. So even though my students are always shocked that I don't know if they are speaking Russian or Romanian during break time, I feel better knowing apparently to an untrained ear it isn't so clear.

As you saw from the ț in nemțesc there are some special letters in Romanian which makes the pronunciation a bit tricky in particular ă and â. These two letters have been the bane of my existence in class as they sound very similar. Â is not so bad I guess as long as you pronounce it like you are being punched in the gut and ă is like a mix of a schwa and a short e sound I guess. A schwa being the word for the sound we make with e in the word "the" but it's not exactly the same.

All of my students tell me if I know a Romance language already it will make Romanian that much easier to learn because of grammar and vocabulary. For sure there are some similarities. For example "la revedere" sounds a lot like "arrivederci" in Italian for goodbye. And "eu" for I is a lot like "yo" in Spanish.

Another cool thing about studying Romanian here in Moldova is that it is the first time I have studied a language in a multilingual classroom. There are a few Americans, some Ukrainians, a Turk, and even a Moldovan. Yes a Moldovan. That's another fascinating thing because of the Romanian/Russian language divide among the population here that there could be some cities in Moldova that just speak Russian primarily. But what I find cool is that there isn't a common language all of the students share except for Romanian. Our teacher speaks Russian, English, and Romanian so she can translate but for the most part she just speaks Romanian to us even when someone asks a question in Russian or English. So when people ask me how I teach English without knowing the local language I think this setting would be perfect for them to see. Ideally, we shouldn't need to use a second language. Of course students could translate for each other but only half of the class is going to be able to understand Russian or English depending on where they are from. So we are all forced to communicate in Romanian. And we were able to put that into practice today when we went out to lunch at a Turkish restaurant. Fortunately, the Turkish guy speaks English and Russian so we had a translator if we were at a loss for words but for the most we tried to only communicate in Romanian to include everyone in the conversation. It must have been amusing for anyone listening in at our table to hear a mix of Turkish, English, Russian, and Romanian all being spoken at our table.

Also if you want to hear what Romanian sounds like, this song is my new favorite
Carla's Dream