Romanian is one of the five major Romance languages that evolved from Latin —the four others are Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. Not everyone knows this, so Romanian is sometimes called “the forgotten Romance language”.
The perception of Romanian as a hard-to-learn language is likely due to Romania’s location in Eastern Europe, where neighboring countries speak rather challenging languages, including Hungarian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Ukrainian.
The difficulty of learning a foreign language depends on the differences between that language and one’s native language. Learning Romanian may be difficult for a Japanese or Chinese speaker, but for an English speaker, it is not.
The U.S. Foreign Service Institute rates languages in four categories based on their learning difficulty for English speakers:
| Category | Languages |
|---|---|
| 1) easiest languages | Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Norwegian, Dutch, ... |
| 2) | German, Indonesian, ... |
| 3) hard languages | Bulgarian, Czech, Thai, Russian, Finnish, ... |
| 4) very hard languages | Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, ... |
The FSI estimates that reaching “general professional proficiency” in Romanian requires 24 weeks of full-time study. The same study duration applies to Italian, Dutch, and Norwegian, while Spanish and French take slightly longer, at 30 weeks each.
So, Romanian is one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn. We will now briefly explain why this is the case.
If you look at the 1000 most common Romanian words, you will notice that quite a few resemble their English translations. Here are some examples:
| Romanian | English |
|---|---|
| pagină | page |
| muzică | music |
| calitate | quality |
| serviciu | service |
| rezultat | result |
| decizie | decision |
| exemplu | example |
| adresă | address |
| artă | art |
| republică | republic |
| natură | nature |
| teritoriu | territory |
Learning Romanian is made easier by the many similar vocabulary words between Romanian and English. Most of these pairs of similar words are cognates, meaning they have a common origin —in most cases, a Latin word.
Romanian vocabulary, to a large extent, comes from Latin because the Romanian language evolved from Latin. Although English didn’t evolve from Latin —it is a Germanic language— many English words do come from Latin.
Many Latin-derived words in English come from the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, when Old Norman (a French dialect) became used by the Anglo-Norman government in England, resulting in an influx of Latin-derived French words.
Romanian does have some vocabulary words that come from Slavic languages because Romania is in Eastern Europe, where many of its neighbors use Slavic languages (this is the case of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Ukraine).
But words of Slavic origin account for only about 12% of the total vocabulary terms used in Romanian. So that does not add too much extra difficulty for those learning the language. Here are some examples of such terms:
| Romanian | English |
|---|---|
| da | yes |
| prieten | friend |
| bogat | rich |
| morcov | carrot |
| scump | expensive |
| dovadă | proof |
Romanian uses a variant of the same Latin alphabet used in English. Romanian has an extra five letters (ă, â, î, ș, and ț) in addition to the 26 letters used in English, which brings the total to 31 letters.
The use of the Latin alphabet makes Romanian easier to learn as it does not require memorizing an entirely new alphabet, in the way that Russian, Thai, or Hebrew does.
Romanian is a phonetic language as the spelling of words closely matches their pronunciation. This contributes to making Romanian easy to learn.
English and French, in contrast, are less phonetic because many words have silent letters, and different letter combinations can produce the same sound.
Not everything about learning Romanian is easy. The language has three grammatical genders (like Latin) and noun case declensions (again like Latin). Those who know some Latin will have an easier time learning Romanian.