Learn Romanian
Romanian is a Romance language that kept a case system and a layer of Slavic vocabulary, which makes it feel familiar and strange in the same sentence. The spelling, though, is nearly transparent, so the on-ramp is short: iLexiBox spends it on the two vowels English does not have, and on the fact that Romanian never writes its stress.
Start at the alphabet
The Romanian on-ramp is written by hand, not generated, and it is 198 cards long. Every card is spoken in a recorded Romanian voice, and what you get right is scheduled for review rather than shown again at random. This is the shorter, starter size of on-ramp; most languages here have about 480 cards.
- 31letters
- 10digits
- 17pronunciation rules
- 100core words
- 20everyday phrases
- 20sentences
Three of the pronunciation cards, exactly as the on-ramp teaches them:
- copil — Romanian never writes its stress, and the stress moves — ko-PEEL, feh-RYAS-truh, ka-FYA, but KAR-teh. There is no rule to learn and no accent to look for, so take the stressed syllable from the audio and store it with the wordfereastră — a window
- mână — one short word holding both vowels English does not have. The â is tight and high — “ee” with the tongue pulled back and the lips flat. The final ă is a plain schwa, the “a” of “sofa”. They are different vowels; merging them into one “uh” is the commonest beginner errormasă — a table
- telefon — no vowel is ever swallowed. English flattens unstressed vowels into “uh” — TEL-uh-fuhn — and Romanian never does: te-le-FON, three clean full vowels. The only schwa in the language is the one actually written ăbanană — a banana
Your first Romanian phrases
The first phrase and sentence cards of the on-ramp, each spoken in a recorded voice:
- Ce mai faci? cheh my FACH — how are you? (informal)
- Ce mai faceți? cheh my fa-CHETS — how are you? (polite)
- Sunt bine, mulțumesc. soont BEE-neh, mool-tsoo-MESK — I’m fine, thank you
- Eu sunt Ana. YEU soont A-na — I am Ana.
- Sunt din Anglia. soont deen AN-glee-a — I am from England.
Then material that does not run out
Above the on-ramp sit the practice path (A1 to C2), Make a text at your level and the album: more than 2,700 photographs, each captioned and spoken in Romanian. Romanian has practice and tools, not lessons — the only course on iLexiBox is the full English course (how each part works).
What Romanian actually costs a beginner
â and î are the same tight high vowel — an ee with the tongue pulled back and the lips flat — and ă is a plain schwa. mână holds both, and merging them into one uh is the commonest beginner error. The second cost is the opposite of an English habit: no unstressed vowel is ever swallowed, so telefon is te-le-FON with three clean vowels rather than TEL-uh-fuhn. And because the stress moves and is never marked, the on-ramp stores it with the word, on the audio, where it can actually be learned.
The full English course, A1–C1 →