Many years ago, in my struggle to get a grasp on the Romanian language, I picked up a book that was simply entitled Romanian Grammar. It was filled with all kinds of complicated words like “genitive” and “declension” and “vocative” and basically made no sense to me – until years later when I already SPOKE Romanian and by then it was pretty much useless. These … Continue reading Romanian Grammar 101: Noun Cases
Just when you thought you’ve finally got a handle on who the Romanians are, their language, their culture and their long and tortured history, up pops the Aromanians. Say what? Yeah, you know, the Aromanians. It turns out Romanians come in a wide variety of flavors: there’s the Aromanians, the Bromanians (my personal favorite), the Cromanians, the Dromanians, etc. Collect them all! Nah, I’m just … Continue reading Hey, hey we’re the Aromanians
At some point in your travels in Romania you’re going to need to eat something and you’re going to hear a few phrases that would be useful to understand. Just like my post on drum bun earlier, these are phrases that are obligatory. This means they aren’t “oh hey use ’em whenever the mood strikes you”. No! You must say these at the right time … Continue reading Expression of the Day – Pofta Mare/Buna
As I’ve mentioned before, Romanian language is a little ahem *coughcough* fluid on the spelling of the language. This can get damn confusing if you’re ahem *coughcough* some hopeless idiot foreigner trying to LEARN it so I’m going to give you a super short primer in the hopes that you won’t have to suffer for years (literally) trying to sort it all out. To illustrate … Continue reading Hijinks in Spelling – Orthography Fun!
If you speak English and see the expression drum bun your mind conjures up a musical instrument for striking out rhythms combined with some kind of light bread style pastry and it makes NO SENSE. That being said, in Romanian it DOES make sense, sort of. Drum (pronounced droom) literally means a “road” or “path” and bun (boon) just means “good”. So drum bun literally … Continue reading Expression of the Day – Drum Bun
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