Ahhh yes, plurals, a constant and very difficult subject for people learning the Romanian language.

Over the years I’ve learned a number of languages (or parts of them) and Romanian is one of the trickiest because it doesn’t follow any sort of internal rules that you can simply memorize. Furthermore, because it is an inflected language (see my post here on noun cases), this means that:

• Verbs must be conjugated
• Adjectives must match gender/number; AND
• All nouns have declensions

Therefore all nouns and adjectives have to match (luckily adverbs don’t).

Consider this phrase: limba straina (foreign language).

A great resource for finding the declensions of nouns is here, which tells us that “limba” is feminine (click on “Get Declension”).

The adjective in this case – “strain” – (foreign) must be modified to match the noun in question, therefore “strain” takes the feminine version and becomes “straina”.

So far, so good as many languages use the format that words ending in “a” are feminine, so that’s relatively easy to understand.

But how do we pluralize this phrase? Turns out the answer is: limbi straine.

How do we know? Well the same website linked above shows that the pluralized form of “limba” is “limbi” so that part was relatively easy. But why is it “straine” and not “straini” to match? Aren’t they both feminine and thus pluralized the same?

Sadly, no.

Let’s take a different tact and we’ll see why.

Imagine the phrase: baiat strain (foreign boy).

Clearly in this case “baiat” is masculine so we then use the masculine version of the adjective for foreign, being “strain”. What would the plural be?

Again, using the same website, we see the plural for “baiat” is “baieti”. Woah! And then the plural form of the adjective would be “straini” (masculine form) so the pluralized version of “baiat strain” would end up being “baieti straini”.

Confused yet? Good! But wait, it gets even more confusing.

Some words that end in “a” are actually masculine, such as “tata” (father). Therefore if you had a foreign father it would be “tata strain” and the pluralized version would be “tati straini”.

Therefore “foreign languages” would be: limbi straine; and

“foreign fathers” would be: tati straini.

You have approximately two options when learning pluralization in Romanian.

Option 1 – Memorize the 50 different forms of pluralization and how they change depending on gender and number; or

Option 2 – Just listen to and read a lot of Romanian and then you will begin to get a natural feeling for how these things work together.

Sadly, neither option is easy, I’m here to tell you.

There’s a great wikipedia article describing nouns here but again it’s a long list of “generally it’s this but sometimes it’s that” and I at least could never memorize all those rules.

Furthermore, some adjectives have both a feminine and masculine version and some don’t. Fun times!

The most common one of these wacko adjectives is verde (green). There is only a unisex singular version and a unisex plural version.

Example: limba verde (green tongue/language, whatever that means LOL) in the plural becomes limbi verzi because there is no female plural version of “verde”. It only seems like it should be “verze” but it isn’t because that form doesn’t exist.

Therefore: Limbi straine sunt (are) limbi verzi is a legitimate sentence.

Every single Romanian, in their head, “just knows” the gender of every single noun and adjective and slots them together in their head without thinking about it. That’s clearly not possible if you’re learning this language as an adult.

The first thing you have to do is start learning (and feeling) what the gender of each noun is, which can be extremely confusing if you speak other languages with gender, as often they won’t be the same. The word “flower” in Italian is masculine, feminine in Spanish and feminine in Romanian.

Furthermore, Romanian has the “third gender” known as “neuter” which is nothing more and nothing less than masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural.

Even though there are a lot of plural forms, it isn’t an infinite amount and you need to get the hang of hearing and constructing these forms until they sound familiar. Use the link above to find these out.

A list of a few nouns and their plural form:

English	Singular	Plural	Gender
boy	baiat	baieti	masculine
car	masina	masini	feminine
pajama(s)	pijama	pijamale	feminine
girl	fata	fete	feminine
tomato	rosie	rosii	feminine
mountain	munte	munti	masculine
coffee	cafea	cafele	feminine
sun	soare	sori	masculine
brick	caramida	caramizi	feminine
cable	cablu	cabluri	neuter
(writing) pen	pix	pixuri	neuter

So you can see how confusing it is already. Two words which are both feminine and end in “a” (masina and pijama) have different plural forms.

Two other words both ending in “e” (munte and rosie) are of two different genders and have different plural forms.

Also the interior part of the words often changes when it becomes plural. The word “fata” becomes “fete”, “baiat” becomes “baieti” and “caramida” becomes “caramizi”.

I wish I could sit here and tell you that there is some easy rule to understand how to pluralize all these words but there just isn’t. There is no way to look at a word and know its gender, period. Nor its plural form.

Nonetheless, you need to start getting a feeling for the gender and forms of all words you learn in Romanian. The good news here is that once you learn the forms, they never change.

Let’s take the two adjectives we’ve been working with, strain and verde and match them up.

English	Singular	Plural	Gender
foreign pen	pix strain	pixuri straine	neuter
green pen	pix verde	pixuri verzi	neuter
foreign tomato	rosie straina	rosii straine	feminine
green tomato	rosie verde	rosii verzi	feminine
foreign car	masina straina	masini straine	feminine
green car	masina verde	masini verzi	feminine
foreign brick	caramida straina	caramizi straine	feminine
green brick	caramida verde	caramizi verzi	feminine
foreign boy	baiat strain	baieti straini	masculine
green boy	baiat verde	baieti verzi	masculine

Now let’s throw into the mix an adjective with it’s own multiple forms, the word for “hot” (meaning temperature not spicy).

English	Singular	Plural	Gender
hot	calda	calde	feminine
hot	cald	calzi	masculine

So let’s see if we can use this adjective with the nouns we’ve already discussed.

English	Singular	Plural	Gender
hot tomato	rosie calda	rosii calde	feminine
hot brick	caramida calda	caramizi calde	feminine
hot pen	pix cald	pixuri calde	neuter
hot sun	soare cald	sori calzi	masculine
hot father	tata cald	tati calzi	masculine

Again, the “neuter” is masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, hence the weirdness above for the word “pix”, as it uses the masculine adjective in the singular (cald) and the feminine in the plural (calde).

This is why it’s so important to use Romanian enough that the gender is something you can “just feel” and don’t have to think about and analyze.

If it sounds confusing, it is. But as your vocabulary grows, practice learning all the different forms and state changes each nouns or adjective goes through.

To find the various forms for adjectives, go to the same website and plug in the Romanian word and click on “Cauta Definitie”.

For example the adjective “lucky” (see the results here):

Singular Masculine	Singular Feminine	Plural Masculine	Plural Feminine
norocos	norocoasa	norocosi	norocoase

Following all that gives us this:

English	Singular	Plural	Gender
lucky tomato	rosie norocoasa	rosii norocoase	feminine
lucky brick	caramida norocoasa	caramizi norocoase	feminine
lucky pen	pix norocos	pixuri norocoase	neuter
lucky boy	baiat norocos	baieti norocosi	masculine
lucky father	tata norocos	tati norocosi	masculine

Yes I realize it’s the devil to learn.

Just remember, the gender/number of the noun determines the gender/number of the adjective(s).

Despite the average Romanian speaker’s arrogance on this topic, they too often do not know how to pluralize or modify a word if they haven’t already previous learned the forms. I remember sitting around once listening to some native speakers debate the correct plural form of “balta” (puddle) because they were unsure whether it was “balti” or “balte” (it’s the former) precisely because until you’ve memorized the forms, there’s just no way to know what they are.

Don’t give up hope!