Language lessons

Pete wrote recently about how we're learning Romanian.  We chose this language to learn (as opposed to Russian) because we figured it would be relatively easy to learn, since we'd at least already know the alphabet.  After only a few official lessons I can now say that there are several factors that conspire to disprove that theory.

Here's what I've realized so far:

1.  Pretty much all of the vowels in Romanian are pronounced the opposite of how we would in English.  And a lot of them sound like a mix between a very short "i" sound and a very short "u" sound -- except the "u," of course.

2.  Unlike French (which feels to me like you ignore about half of the letters in each word when pronouncing it), each letter IS pronounced... except if there is an "i" at the end of the word.  Then you just don't say it.  We live in the neighborhood called Biuicani, but it's pronounced "bue-ee-cahn" (I think) -- no "i" at the end.  Another example is the word for 10: zece.  It's pronounced "zay-chay" but then when you get into the higher numbers, like 30, the word becomes treizeci, and it's pronounced "tray-zaych."  Just drop the poor little "i" at the end -- always!

3. Even the consonants are tricky.  They have letters like our "L," but it sounds sometimes like an "n."  "C" sounds like "ch" -- unless it has a little hat on it, then it's "s."  An "r" at the end of a word often sounds like a "d."  It's like all the letters have just rotated their sounds!  And then they add the little symbols above or below the letters, and all the sounds shift again.  Our poor little children just learning to read in English are now getting confused.  Sometimes the symbol "w" says the English "w" sound, and sometimes it says "v!"  It's a complicated code to break.

4. When the word for "you" in the language is dumneavoastra (with a little symbol over the a at the end), you know you're in for a steep learning curve.  (My American tendency towards efficiency just has to say that that is an awful lot of syllables for such a commonly spoken word!  I mean, seriously.)


To make this challenge even more... um, exciting (?), our teacher told us today that even if we ever master the Romanian language, we may still not be able to understand many Moldovans, since they have a lot of words and phrases that part Russian.  The first half of a word can be Romanian and the second half Russian!

All I can say is that the Moldovans are pretty impressive with their juggling of 2 languages.... this does not come easily to me!