How much harder is Romanian compared to the other Romance languages?

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Dtmont
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How much harder is Romanian compared to the other Romance languages?

Postby Dtmont » Thu Sep 16, 2021 8:57 pm

Does anyone here have experience with Romanian? Is the difficulty for a native english speaker considerably noticeable compared to other Romance languages or is the difficulty overestimated? According to the FSI list French is ranked as more difficult, I assume because of pronunciation. So are the added cases and Slavic/Hungarian/Greek loans really not much of an added difficulty?
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AroAro
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Re: How much harder is Romanian compared to the other Romance languages?

Postby AroAro » Fri Sep 17, 2021 2:04 pm

I'm not a native English speaker but I know French, Italian and Romanian and in my opinion, cases and Slavic loans are not what makes Romanian a little bit more difficult than French and Italian. There are only 3 cases (nominative-accusative, genitive-dative and vocative - but you can perfectly live without using it). And as for loanwords, it is believed that around 80% words come from Latin/French/Italian anyway, the other 20% Slavic/Hungarian/Greek/Turkic words is what makes Romanian special, not more difficult.

So what makes Romanian slightly more difficult are the features it shares with other languages of Balkan sprachbund - mainly the very limited use of infinitives (in Romanian, you always say "I want that I go outside" and not "I want to go outside") and the postclitic articles ("restaurantul"="restaurant-the"). It takes some time to get used to these features but it's not an impossible task so I think the difficulty is overestimated. Not many people actually learn Romanian (unlike French or Italian) so there may be an aura of mystery around this language.
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Re: How much harder is Romanian compared to the other Romance languages?

Postby Iversen » Fri Sep 17, 2021 2:12 pm

The pronunciation of French may be a problem, but Roman also has its quirks in the form of a midtongue vowel and a schwab vowel (/ə/) - but no nasals and few if any silent letters in the orthography. The big problem when it comes to pronunciation is probably that you will have fewer chances to hear it spoken and fewer chances to speak it yourself. You will need a special keyboard setup for both languages.

However Romanian has three genders (although the neutrum just combines forms from the masculine and the feminine), it has three cases (nominative+accusative versus dative-genitive plus a little used vocative), postclitic articles and it has a verbal system that may cause Anglophones a few problems. Of course it has 1-2-3. person singular and plural like French, but there are three ways to express the future. And most noticeable: the use of the infinitive is limited so you'll mostly use a subordinate clause with a verb in the subjunctive instead. OK, French also has a subjunctive (and it is alive and well), but French uses its infinitive more à la English. And then there is a funny possessive thingy (some call it article, others just particle in spite of it being inflected), which isn't found in any other Romance language. So the Romanian grammar will probably seem slightly harder than the French one. On the other hand, my inpression is that you almost have to learn two different languages when you study French because the literary writing style is so far from actual speech. This is less of a problem in Romanian.

And then there is the vocabulary, where French is much easier because of William the Bastard and his ferocious hordes who injected a slew of French words into English. There is also a fair amount of French loanwords in Romanian, but fewer than in English - and instead it has adopted a lot of words from the Slavic languages and Turkish, which you don't find in French and definitely not in English.

So all in all I would say that Romanian will be more challenging than French, but they are not poles apart.
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