Can An Italian Understand Romanian?
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- Опубліковано 6 сер 2023
- And episode 3 it is! We did Portuguese, we did Madrid Spanish, what about Romanian? Let's find out!
Links to the videos I watch from these Romanian youtubers
• ÎNCERC TOATE AROMELE M...
• Your favourite place i...
• TEAPA sau REAL? | Andr...
Romania (/roʊˈmeɪniə/ (listen) roh-MAY-nee-ə; Romanian: România [romɨˈni.a] (listen)) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and the Black Sea to the southeast. It has a predominantly temperate-continental climate, and an area of 238,397 km2 (92,046 sq mi), with a population of under 18.9 million inhabitants (2023). Romania is the twelfth-largest country in Europe and the sixth-most populous member state of the European Union. Its capital and largest city is Bucharest, followed by Iași, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Constanța, Craiova, Brașov, and Galați.
Europe's second-longest river, the Danube, rises in Germany's Black Forest and flows southeasterly for 2,857 km (1,775 mi), before emptying into Romania's Danube Delta. The Carpathian Mountains cross Romania from the north to the southwest and include Moldoveanu Peak, at an altitude of 2,544 m (8,346 ft).[11]
Settlement in what is now Romania began in the Lower Paleolithic followed by written records attesting the kingdom of Dacia, its conquest, and subsequent Romanisation by the Roman Empire during late antiquity. The modern Romanian state was formed in 1859 through a personal union of the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The new state, officially named Romania since 1866, gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877. During World War I, after declaring its neutrality in 1914, Romania fought together with the Allied Powers from 1916. In the aftermath of the war, Bukovina, Bessarabia, Transylvania, and parts of Banat, Crișana, and Maramureș became part of the Kingdom of Romania.[12] In June-August 1940, as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Second Vienna Award, Romania was compelled to cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union and Northern Transylvania to Hungary. In November 1940, Romania signed the Tripartite Pact and, consequently, in June 1941 entered World War II on the Axis side, fighting against the Soviet Union until August 1944, when it joined the Allies and recovered Northern Transylvania. Following the war and occupation by the Red Army, Romania became a socialist republic and a member of the Warsaw Pact. After the 1989 Revolution, Romania began a transition towards democracy and a market economy.
Romanian (obsolete spellings: Rumanian or Roumanian; autonym: limba română [ˈlimba roˈmɨnə] (listen), or românește, lit. 'in Romanian') is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. As a minority language it is spoken by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania (Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia, Italy and Ukraine), and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 28-29 million people as an L1+L2 language, of whom c. 24 million are native speakers. In Europe, Romanian occupies the 10th position among 37 official languages.[12]
Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries.[13] To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. Romanian was also known as Moldovan in Moldova, although the Constitutional Court of Moldova ruled in 2013 that "the official language of Moldova is Romanian".[nb 1] On 16 March 2023, the Moldovan Parliament approved a law on referring to the national language as Romanian in all legislative texts and the constitution. On 22 March, the president of Moldova, Maia Sandu, promulgated the law.[14]
Overview
The history of the Romanian language started in the Roman provinces north of the Jireček Line in Classical antiquity, over a large area. Between the 6th and 8th century, following the accumulated tendencies inherited from the vernacular spoken in this large area and, to a much smaller degree, the influences from native dialects, and in the context of a lessened power of the Roman central authority the language evolved into Common Romanian. This proto-language then came into close contact with the Slavic languages and subsequently divided into Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, and Daco-Romanian.[15][16] Due to limited attestation between the 6th and 16th century, entire stages from its history are re-constructed by researchers, often with proposed relative chronologies and loose limits.[17]
#italian #romanian #language
Romanian is mindblowing! I visited Romania with a friend. During our visit I've noticed that "bilet" (="ticket") is "biletul" almost the same as in Polish. Than "tramwaj" (=tram) was also "tramwaj" (I'm not sure about the written form but it was pronounced alike). Knowing that, I risked saying in pure Polish "Poproszę dwa bilety na tramwaj" to the man in a ticket booth. He understood me and vary happy answered in English "Welcome, our Serbian friends! 😀" That was really cute and funny.
I love Romania. I'll keep coming back!!! ❤ Greetings from Poland.
Bilet and tramvaj are actually imported, I assume the first is from some kind or romance language (FR - Billet, IT - Biglietto, ES - bilette) and tram is literally international... it is remarkable that both tramvaj and tramvai are actually an import of Tram-way or tram-weg or tram-vej or tram-via or tram-vie which means the rails on which the tram is running rather than the car or the service itself.
Thank you for your kind words :-) fills my heart with joy.
@@soldieroffortune308 billete*
Polish are nice ppl
Polish big respect becouse of greatest Pope Paul from a ortodox faith
Funny how the more he listens, the more he understands!
If he will live in Romania for 3 days he will understand 50% with ease!
Way to go mate!
Because he has no exposure to the language.
@@danascully6698 Indeed.
Cu cat sunt mai frumoase, cu atat le intelege mai bine
I hope not cause our cursing is... :D
@@andrewaroiu Part of the territory. It adds flavor to the language :D
You read very very well in Romanian. The words that you didn't understand are actually easy to understand for an Italian if you listen to them carefully, because, like in the case of the word "marea" (the sea), you heard "mara" instead.
Italian is extremely close to Romanian (closer than french or even spanish). This is why Romanians speak very good Italian in 1-2 months of living in Italy.
Romanian is closer to south Italian than north Italian - maybe that is why you can read so well in Romanian, a phonetic written language.
Big fan.
there is an anecdote when Romanians emigrated to USA New York
many didnt understand English but if Italian
and Romanians bought in Italian markets
Il rumeno se lo senti parlare sembra un dialetto latino che non si capisce in fatto di senso se invece lo leggi diventa facilissimo (l'esempio che hai fatto con "marea" è perfetto per confermare quanto dico )
PS è dovuto a mio parere dalle influenze nel corso degli anni difatti il rumeno antico del basso medioevo e primo periodo rinascimentale è facilissimo sia da ascoltare che da leggere quasi di più dell'italiano di Dante
I'm mother tongue English and fully bilingual in Italian. I learnt Romanian in about three months living in the country. I had your same difficulties at first and my school Latin was really helpful.
Romanian is a beautiful language where its ancient Latin roots mingle with Slavic and with many other languages, from German to Turkish.
Good job on learning romanian but it looks like you still need to practice on your english. Cheers!
As a Portuguese speaker, it's funny to hear Romanian because it sounds like if a person knew how to speak all romance languages and was drunk and started talking in every single romance language all at once, I can pick up a few words and then completely fall off in others, like it suddenly changed language, a lot of what I can understand sounds or is written more similar to italian or spanish or even latin and some is down right similar to portuguese, it's insane. I love the language and it sounds beautiful listening to, but also listening to Romanian makes me feel like i'm going insane, haha, like something that I should understand but the words fly right above my head.
LMAO, as a romanian that was funny
It's not language fault, it is you, your lack of intuition and cultural limitations. Try other hobbies. Peace
See if you can understand this phrase from romanian:
" In aceasta casa,cu un litru de vin si un kil de carne de vaca nu se moare de foame sau de sete"
Honestly now, as a romanian, i find portuguese is the most exotic sounding of the latin languages-and the most underrated of the seafaring nations too!
Travelling the world,if you speak English,French(much of Africa) and Spanish(Central and south America),you're good to go.Even in Brazil(or Portugal) for starters,spanish can make you understood,and you grasp portuguese when given a response.
Same for me with Portuguese - I learned French, then a bit of Spanish, but I love Portuguese the best - maybe due to fado/Amalia Rodrigues, heard when I was a little boy.
speaking of drunk, to my ears Portugese has always sounded like the drunk one night stand baby of Russian and Spanish😅
As a Romanian, I'm so happy to see you covered this language. Great job!
Don't forget to kiss his feet if you meet him.
@@valevisa8429 don't be muist ;)
Are you a gypsy ? I heard there are a lot in your country.@@opus1537
@@valevisa8429what do you mean? Why did u say that?
@@valevisa8429taci fă.
As an italian, romanian sounds clear and familiar to me, that's not the case of french and portuguese for example, even if , at least for me, it's very difficult to get the meaning of the words when hearing the spoken language for the first time. But with a little bit of study it becomes quickly understandable. On the contrary, the written language is much more comprehensible at first sight; clearly one should study the grammar in order to connect the words, because it's a declinated langauge. I point out that romanian it's the onlly romance language (without taking into account regional languages and dialects) whose plurals end with the vowel e or i, like in italian, that makes it very familiar under a certain point of view.
My comment: if someone could comprehend all the italian dialects then undestanding romanian will be much easier. Some latin grammar will also help (see the articles that we put at the end of the words). Ex.: italian - il cane, romanian - cainele. Of course some knowledge of turk, slav, albanian, dacic, magyar will help.😅
declinated declinated declinated ？？？？？
@@ambarvalia9757 L A T I N
@stefano 🇷🇴🫶🏻🇮🇹
oh it may sound funny to you but the plural in romanian is not as easy you would think
My father is italian, from the North. I live in Canada, and worked with a Romanian immigrant, and a lot of our day was filled with me learning Romanian. such a fun language! Look up their word for carrot for example. I love their food, especially Salate de Vinete, and I learned to make it. (Don't tell my italian ancestors)
Morcov 🥕😂
Me too i love Salata de 🍆😊
Noi in rumeno chiamamo come voi: "mare" perro.quando dicciamo" marea" solo mare con îl aritcolo" il mare" 😊
bruh salata de vinete is so fucking good I refused to acknowledge my allergy to eggplants for the longest time. Even now I just shrug it off (don't worry, it's just mild irritation).
@@chukyuniqul after you cook the eggplants, you need to let them drain, because that liquid is a bit powerful and hard on the liver. I think that liquid gives you the irritation. When they are drained, you put the eggplant cream in a mixer and they become so smooth just like a milkcream. You can eat them like so or i add a lot of onions because i love them (and sometimes tomatoes )
In Romanian we also have a lot of words where we use both slavic & latin variants. Examples: love - iubire (slavic) - amor (latin), friend - prieten (slavic) - amic (latin) etc. So it really depends what the person you’re listening to prefers:) I usually change my vocab a bit if Im trying to comunicate with an Italian/Spanish person
How do you know if one word is Latin derived and another is Slavic? To me, an Italian, it sounds obvious but I'd reckon that's because I only use the latin ones. That's a very interesting thing in Romanian though
@@Bolognabeefthe one who know are only the ones which are studying the ethimology of the words. I and 99% of romanians never tought about this. Anyway he gave two examples which are extremly obvious. Almost everybody listened italian songs or watch italian movies in which are used amic/amor.
I've almost never heard anybody using the word amor. Amic is rarely used, and it means something less of a prieten and more of an acquaintance (cunoştință).
In Spanish we have a similar phenomenon with Latin / Arabic / Native words like:
Escualo (Latin) / Tiburón (Native) - 🦈
Escorpión (Latin) / Alacrán (Arabic) - 🦂
Vulpeja/Vulpino (Latin) / Zorro (Unknown) - 🦊
Óleo (Latin) / Aceite (Arabic) - Oil
Oliva (Latin) / Aceituna (Arabic) - 🫒
@@ronaldmcmaster9148words like "amor" and "amic" are used in literature and by the older generations in conjunction with iubire and prieten, the younger generations have a more limited vocabulary so they don't tend to use synonyms to avoid repetitive phrases, that's why they sound as dull as a wall
It's so weird to hear someone pronounce Romanian words almost natively but to have no idea what they mean :D
Other than the vocabulary, the grammar is quite different from other romance languages.
Perfect video though, I have to admit!
Probably speaking both Italian and Latin helped him
Weird, I find the grammar pretty similar. Or it depends what you mean
Romanian grammar is very Latin. I dare to say that is the most Latin from all the romance languages. That is why Romanian is difficult to understand for other romance languages speakers and some of them for us Romanian speakers. As Metatron him self notest his knowledge of Latin is more useful in understanding Romanian than his Italian. On the other hand, Romanian speakers have less trouble understanding Italian or Spanish without necessarily learn them first. 🙂
@@AlexandruBurda I understand neither, but I was exposed to the sound of Romanian through my religious practice and faith (I practice Eastern Orthodox Christianity in case you wondered), my impression of Romanian is that it's basically Latin with siginficant Balkan accent :P
Also at the end when he pronounced “forțe” as “forte” and then said “in Italian it’s “forze”” which is pronounced the same although with a different letter.
Here's an interesting one: you read "Întindere" and translated it to "to mean", because "intendere" is "meaning" in Italian. However, Romanian picked up another of the Latin meanings of the term, which is "stretch". So what you read there, "vastelor întinderi de apă", would mean "of the vast stretches of water". You know "vast", just as in English. Then, we added "-elor" at its end. This means "of the", so it creates the genitive of the word "vast". "Întinderi" is the plural of "Întindere". "De" means "of" and "apa" is how we adapted "aqua", meaning water. The letter "ă" that replaces the final "a" in "apă" just shows that the noun has no article. So it's just "water" not "the water". That letter, "ă" is pronounced just like you would pronounce "a" in the sentence "I saw a dog".
intendere became intenție
In fact Romanian preserved the original meaning of the verb, intendo-intendere; only in medieval Latin is become to understand.
Same here. As a spaniard, I take some sparse words but I can't make sense of them at all. I'm always amazed by how romanians learn spanish so fast and how precise their pronunciation becomes in no time. They're awesome.
I'm learning Spanish on duolingo and I find it fairly easy. We got exposed to Spanish media like soap operas and other types of TV shows and a lot of the kids that grew up with those left for a better future in Spain. And as young adults I guess they embraced the language easily.
Spanish appears simplistic in comparison to Romanian grammar and declensions
I'm learning Spanish! And I'm Romanian! Everyone comments on how perfect my accent is... but they refrain from telling me how horrible my grammar is. It's okay, I've only been studying for 6 months. I'll get there, eventually.
And you would be shocked 😳 how many Portuguese words, phrases, and expressions in Romanian exist with Portuguese! They can even sound like an actual Portuguese person from Portugal speaking! I can understand Spanish very well almost 100 percent because it follows Portuguese as if we were twins 👯 “ Spanish and Portuguese. “
@@simonapalen9376 Have you ever tried to learn Portuguese ? You would be shocked 😳 how much Portuguese and Romanian are embedded with the same words, expressions, and pronunciations together! I can understand a lot of Romanian sometimes. It is as Romanian wants to attach to Portuguese and Italian most of the time. Also some French too !
You definitely could read Romanian almost perfectly. I know that most Romance speaking people understand Romanian reading it more than listening. Marea is definitive form like "The Sea" while Mare means just Sea
İt's actually quite the opposite in my experience.
I guess this is because the way some very common letters are pronounced in Romanian, particularly ă and â, is completely foreign to other Romance speakers, and quite a few words are audibly more recognizable compared to reading them.
i thought the sardinian would have helped a lot, as someone who has conversational Romanian i notice some more similaritaies than with other romance languages. the U sounds cu- with etc.
The Romanian letter -ă- /ə/ is identical to Catalan unstressed -a- and to Neapolitan final unstressed -a.
The sound /ə/ is not ''completely foreign'' to other Romance-language speakers, such as Portuguese, French, Catalan, Napolitan, etc., but it is mostly written with letter -e.
The Romanian â letter (/ɨ/) is indeed rather hard to be pronounced by the other Romance speakers.
Marea is definitive form like "The Sea", Like from the Sea?
Mare means big like „pula mare”
That "kid" is actually a 25 year old woman that talks like a child because she professionally dubs cartoons and ads on TV. That's why her diction is so much better.
25 is definitely still young enough to refer to as a 'kid', at least for someone like Metatron who I believe is in his early 40s. (Which I never would've guessed had he not mentioned it in a video.)
Her diction is far from good in that video.
@@3wL7she speaks horribly
25 is not a kid for thee?
Her diction is like a spoiled child that never went out to play with real kids.
Hi, I'm a romanian living in Puglia and people here understand a lot of romanian words because they are similar with their dialect. I noticed that maybe it's more similar with dialects then italian language itself.
It’s very interesting the Romanian language because I am Portuguese-American and all my life I have spoken European Portuguese. The Portuguese language can turn also very highly influenced and related to Southern Italian and Romanian. I am trying to learn Romanian because it is interesting to me. Very hard but I find Romanian sound like they are speaking in Portuguese and they do have a lot of Portuguese phrases and words that it is only adaptive to Portuguese! It doesn’t exist neither in Spanish, French, nor Italian. It is only exclusively spoken in Portuguese and Romanian. 😂❤️🇵🇹🇷🇴🇮🇹
@@eileencampos5680 yes, my italian husband always told me that romanian is very similar with portugese for him. I understand a little bit of portugese myself and yes it sounds similar.
@@artemis2569 I am very good with almost all the Latin languages of Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian. I love them all. I heard about Romanian and always felt bad that they were always left out or forgotten to be mentioned in the Latin family languages. So I decided I need to try Romanian. I am so glad I did lol 😂. It does sound like Portuguese for sure lol 😂! There are actual phrases between Romanian and Portuguese that is only exclusively said between these 2 languages. No other languages can seem to understand us lol 😂.
🇵🇹: Eu sou Portuguesa
🇷🇴: Eu sunt Portugheză
🇵🇹: Onde tu fostes ?
🇷🇴: Unde ai fost tu ?
🇵🇹: Meu dor 🤕 ( my pain )
🇷🇴: Meu dor ( My missing or longing for you)
🇵🇹: este ( it means this ) but you pronounce the same in Romanian
“ ishz+te” 😂😂🇵🇹❤️🇷🇴
🇵🇹: Eu tenho fome
🇷🇴: Eu am foame
🇵🇹: Ano de liceu
🇷🇴: Ani de liceu 🏫
🇵🇹: ajuda-me
🇷🇴: ajută-mi
🇵🇹: O urso 🐻 canta
🇷🇴: ursul cânta
🇵🇹: tu é eu
🇷🇴: tu si eu
🇵🇹: escola 🏫 ( don’t pronounce the e in front of school)
🇷🇴: scula
🇵🇹: sogra
🇷🇴: soacra
🇵🇹: Nos somos os formosas e gustosas da familia Latina.
🇷🇴: Noi suntem il frumos 😻 și gustoasă din familia Latină.
@@eileencampos5680 because in the past I think we were all part of the same tribes and then migrated as all other tribes and then formed separate countries and languages but the root language is common.
@@artemis2569 Exactly 👍, well it is interesting 🤨 because I have never been to Romania and knew little about it until I got immersed with the language. To my surprise, I didn’t realize it was an actual Latin language until I was hearing Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian in it with other foreign words that Romanians use called “ loaned “ words. Then, to find out the history of Romanians with the Dacian language and people, the Roman emperor Trajan, who beat the Dacian came from “Iberia” (Portugal and Spain). So of course it is logical that Romanian will also be influenced with Portuguese/Spanish words and language as well.
It is funny 😄 that I am Portuguese and still today, people don’t understand that Spanish and Portuguese are 2 separate countries with 2 separate languages! I think this is why people get confused and disappointed with the Portuguese language expecting it to always be near and having more Spanish in it! So, they end up speaking to us in Spanish instead. I hate to be judgmental but of course, I have to remind them we are NOT SPANISH! If you don’t know Portuguese just speak your language! We can figure it out. We were once great pioneers and explorers that influenced the Portuguese language around the world. So of course we tend to communicate with everyone’s language most of the time! People get shocked that Portuguese is another “ Romance language “ in the same family of Romanian, Italian, Spanish, and French as well. Not a lot of people understand this concept so, they get disillusioned and then criticize Portuguese as a “strange” or “ I can’t understand” when it is evident that Portuguese does exist in everyone else’s language, including some English words!
Interesant că (că = che în italiană) deși avem construcții lingvistice foarte similare, un italian nu înțelege "îmi place mult" care în italiană se zice "mi piace molto". Totuși, mi-a plăcut mult acest video :)
You didn’t understand the word STRADA = street mentioned about three times in a row?!!
I’m shocked!
he finally did...LMAO....it was wrote in the last video with ,,the kids,,...LMAO
bro STRADA
he is not very gifted, is he?
As a Sicilian speaker, I sensed common words between Romanian and Sicilian: salut/salutamu, oameni/omini, locurile/locura, plajei/plaja, cu/cu, ca/ca este/esti, loc/locu, multa/multa (assai more common), si poti/poti/po, multi/multi, cu tine/cu ti/tia, îmi/jiri, munte/munti, exemplu/scempru/sempiu, meu/meu/me’, nascut/nasciutu, ori/uri, meritat/merita, vizitat/visitata, bine/bini/beni, cimitirul/cimiteru, cum/cumu/comu, într/intra, nou/nou/novu, centrul/centru, muzeului/museu, pare/pari, plin/china, bun/bunu/bonu, unde/unni, Iuliu/Juliu, cred ca/cridu/criju ca, ultimii doi ani/ultimi dui anni, acasa/a casa, eu stau/eu/jeu staju
This is by far the most genuine video I've seen of a romance speaker trying to understand Romanian, or rather the most insightful.
Totally agree with you! I saw a video from the channel " Ecolinguist " with Italians trying to understand Romanian and it was so unauthentic, it was clear the guy in that video adapted his Romanian language and speed to facilitate their understanding (I am a native Romanian speaker). This video was very authentic, an Italian speaker listening to Romanians who speak naturally! All cred to this channel! He is awesome!
Romanian here, i remember back in college we had an Italian student from Napoli joining our clases. He didn't study any romanian in advance, he spoke only italian and english but he said he could understand about 60-70% of a conversation. He also mentioned that it depends if you speak a northern italian dialect or a southern one; romanian sounds a lot closer to southern ones.
Same goes for italian in my case, i can understand around 60% of the spoken language.
A few thoughts... as a Romanian, I believe it's much easier for me to understand Italian than the other way around, because I can recognise the common words from Latin, whereas an Italian would have no way of understanding the slavic ones. And my experience in Italy was exactly this: I sometimes didn't understand anything, other times I could read a sentence almost perfectly. It's also very interesting to see what has remained in the language from latin: the most used verbs (to be), pronouns, older nouns etc are almost identical. I ve also noticed that it is much easier for me to understand latin than Italian, which makes perfect sense.
About your choice of videos... the "easy Romanian" one wasn't the greatest choice because it was about names of places, so of course you would have been confused by what is a name of a place and what is a common word. The subtitles would have helped. (Btw, the word before "Romania" that you didn't understand was "țară", meaning "country"(it comes from the latin "terra". We also have a couple of other words derived from it that are much closer in meaning to "earth"/"terra": "țarină" - area of land for agriculture?; "țărână" -earth.) So, the question was "What is your favourite place in (this) country, in Romania?"
I also believe the first guy was harder to understand because he was speaking a bit fast.
One pronunciation rule: the "ț" is pronounced like "ts" or the "zz" in pizza, and the "ș" like "sh". Otherways your pronunciation was great and it is obvious you are well immersed in language learning, because you picked up the pronunciation quite well after you heard it.
* I was surprised you didn't catch "baloane". To be fair, it's the plural and it's a bit harder to catch than the singular "balon". I guess written form is much easier to catch than spoken one (which makes sense). Still, after you learn just a couple of Romanian rules for pronounciation, the language is very easy to spell (unlike English, which is... a struggle at first.😅)
well, he did not even catch stele.
My experience with Romanian is mostly from immersing myself in songs a couple of years ago. That is how I picked up words. Having studied Spanish and Italian it made it easier to compare.
Some words that took me some time to get used to:
dacǎ - if
pentru - for
pentru cǎ - because
încǎ - still
și - and
sau - or
What singers or bands did you listen to? :)
@@3wL7 Mainly the usual artists: Inna, Carla's Dreams, Delia, The Motans, and Antonia. Back in 2018-ish. But I don't listen as much to music anymore.
Is "încă" not "încâ". And for "or" we have "sau" and "ori" depending on the situation. And I have to be honest with you. The rimes in nowadays Romanian songs are a very poor tool to catch Romanian. Try some folk music especially from the 70s. 🙂
Pentru că* = because
@@catalindeluxus8545 Yeah. I must have been tired when writing all this.
I was at MotoGP race in Spielberg (Austria) few years ago with my brother (we are huge Rossi fans)...we were talking Romanian while we were standing in the grass area, and a group of Italians guys approached us with beers and asked us (in Italian) from what region are we cause he couldn't recognize our accent xD was funny cause my brother tried to explain to them (in Italian) that we are Romanians and we speak Romanian, and the guys couldn't believe xD
The most awesome thing was your Romanian pronunciation. It was 89% perfect. Thank you so much for doing this, Metatron. Cheers!
The problem is that even if there are plenty of words of romance origin, you only understand some of them, but not most of them, eg. : ţara - terra, apa - aqua etc.
Thanks for the video!
I am not a Romanian speaker, but as I have learned it a bit, I could understand it.
Țară doesn't mean terra/earth, țară means country.
Example. Country of origin.
@@CRIS.V1891 i know. But it comes from terra
@CRIS.V1891 It comes from the Middle Ages. Țară means more accurately land. Țara Maramureşului = Terra Maramorus = Land of Maramures. Țara Făgăraşului = Land of Fagaras.
This is how Terra came to mean Country.
@@georgelupas3499 Ok you are right, but I was explaining what literally it translates to today and not the historical etimology of the word. But maybe I should of though of that to, and included in my explanation for it to be more complete. But bottom line is that in modern speech for us means exclusive country.
Ps. Apropo e ok că mi-ai răspuns în engleză ca să înțeleagă și alții, dar după cum vezi și eu sunt român. 😉
@@CRIS.V1891 Mi-am dat seama după nume cat de cat ;)) desi doar un roman ar putea tine atat la limba incat sa se asigure ca e interpretata corect. De asta am scris și in engleza și am scris și asta, sa ajut cine citeste, sa il faca poate mai interest de limba.
Desi sincer sa fiu noi romanii suntem cei mai entuziasmati de un video despre limba noastra.
Italian with basic knowledge of Czech here: while spoken Romanian I found generally very difficult to understand except for the occasional words or short sentences, it's usually my language of choice when appliances come with an instruction manual for the central-eastern Europe market (meaning not even English included), as when reading I feel I can normally pick up the meaning between Italian and some slavic words.
Fascinating language.
as a Romanian, I had the same dilemma yesterday and chose Italian. understood 70%
serbian evolved in the locations of proto italo - celtic and tracho-scythians dacians. this is the reason italian, celtic and slavic languages share 90 % reflections.
As Romanian-Russian speaker I can tell you that I understand better Slavic languages then Italian, but if you give me words separately almost all will be ease for me to understand them. Romanian has a lot of influences from Turkish and Greek, that's why I understand very easy Bulgarian. Cause it has a lot of words from Russian, and a lot from Turkish and Greek which are founded in Romanian too.
@@ionmacaria6878 Bulgarian has a lot of words from Russian? Do you know where and on the orders of whom the Cyrillic alphabet was created? Do you know who propagated Christianity to Russia (Kievan Rus)? Do you know where the first Russian Patriarch came from?
@@ronaldmcmaster9148 I know, and you are right. Maybe I didn't express myself right. What I wanted to say is that a lot of words what I know in Russian, can be founded in Bulgarian too...
I'm a native English speaker, but did 10 years of Latin and French at school 40-50 years ago, speak subfluent French and intermediate Spanish and German, and can quite often understand Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian etc.
Romanian here. I've learned Italian without even trying, just by watching football and dubbed Italian TV. So the reason why you couldn't understand the first guy is because he was talking much faster than normal. The best would be to start watching news casters, as they tend to speak the cleanest, most accurate version of any language. The differences can be quite big. Like watching the news and then suddenly Totti or Cassano comes on and then you are like wtf??? :D
The reading segment was very good though. If that was your very first time trying, it was A LOT better than most other attempts I've seen.
Have you ever tried learning European Portuguese ? You would be surprised 😮 how much Romanian is in Portuguese and visa a versa !!! I have been trying to learn Romanian. It is among the hardest Latin languages I have ever learned but it is my favorite ! Trust me! It does sound so much like Portuguese and even the pronunciation with our Latin words are almost quite the same ! 😂😂😂
🇵🇹: Eu sou a primeira para admitir isso! 😂😂😂😂
🇷🇴: Eu sunt la prima pentru admitere astăzi ! 😂😂😂😂
As a Portuguese woman, I believe I could understand that guy either the drinks that the Italian guy couldn’t understand. I will write to you in Portuguese and hopefully you can understand me. Lol 😂 !
🇵🇹: A bebida 🍷 e um produto de alimentar com nata de coco 🥥.
🇬🇧: The drink 🥤 is a product of nutrition with the custard 🍮 of coconut 🥥.
That is what I think I heard what the first video was saying about the drinks in Romanian and the Italian guy couldn’t understand fully what was being said.
I met an italian elder named francesco, he was from napoli. And he mostly spoke italian and i spoke romanian, and we could understand eachother pretty easily. The hard part is the accent to understand but you get used to it
Becouse napoletans have a combination of italian Spanish and French. We romanians have many words from Latin but via french language. In my area is difficult if i start to speak using arhaisms, 30% are from Hungarian, 14% ukrainian, 20% german and some procent of polish. Old trades influence.
As a Romanian, I absolutely LOVED this video 💖
To answer you and make a long story short, you understood the first guy the least because he is using an eastern-southern accent, and it's also in their nature to talk VERY FAST! As a Romanian from the north-west part of the country, I am having some difficulties in following what he says too, actually.
Suggestion: include some local news in your video next time! The news presenters on TV talk the most plain and easy to understand form of the language!
Never thought about news anchors. It's a great hint. Thanks.
Horațiu !
Nu ai nici o dificultate în a înțelege un răgățean cum vorbește. Ești ardelean, asta explică tot. Vei citii acest text acum, și-l vei înțelege peste un an. Așa-i nornal.
;)
@@stop_motion_movie💀💀💀💀
as a native portuguese speaker, the pronunciation in romanian always sounded to me a lot like italian, in general. there are also a lot of words identical to portuguese. regardless, I can't figure out the majority of it when listening or even reading 😅 but it's so cool.
I used to work at a solar power plant several years ago with an Italian team. One day the engineer comes to us laughing his head of: the italians were pissed he could understand almost everything they said without him having any prior interaction with Italian, but they couldn't understand a thing from Romanian.
The thing that throws you off are inflections, the articles and many connection words that sort of "drowns" the gist of the sentence. For example scut=shield, while scutUL= THE shield.
Also, reading is much similar to Italian, with ci, ce, chi, che, gi, ge, ghi, ghe exactly like in Italian. If you look it up how grammar works and how to say with, or, in, like, already.. stuff like that, your understanding jumps form around 10% maybe to at least 50% 😄
9:15 The influence is most probably Bulgarian, not Russian one. Romania used Old Church Slavonic til 17th century for liturgical purposes so most Slavic words in Romanian probably have their roots in OCS which was based on Old Bulgarian.
Correct
As a romanian kid, at 14 yo maybe, took me a couple of weeks to understand a reasonable lvl of italian just by watching cartoons on RAI, because cartoons are spoken in a very simplistic way, so it was easy to follow and to understand. In fact, i recomanded to all my emigrant friends, who went to romance speaking countries, to watch cartoons in that language in order to understand that language at least at basic lvl.
A student from Erasmus came to Romania from Italy. He spent around 6 months here and we talked daily and he speaks a quite good Romanian. He said that as an Italian you can learn it faster because it has a similar grammatic structure and that you can associate words faster than for example a English speaker.
Fun fact :
I am romanian,
I went to high school in Italy
Each time we had to translate from latin to italian, i would always get a decent vote ( 7/8 ) by just mixing the 2 languages to find the meaning of the text, altough in grammar i would always get a 3 or 4 as my highest score xD
Me tooooooo! Exact la fel! 😅😅😅
Funny thing, I also completed high school in Italy although being originally from Romania. Best grade I ever got in It during courses was an 8(one time) the rest were 6 at best. Until we had the maturity exam where I got the highest score in the class. I have no fking clue what happened. maybe it was a teacher bias or just dumb luck...?
@@TimisDanielyou all flood Italy
@@reaux3921 1milion Romanians there, maybe because it is so easy to understand Italian.
idem io ahahah
You read almost perfect in Romanian. Romanian Language is a phonetical language (Exactly like Italian), so, Romanian Language has a letter for every sound :)
Meh, there were quite a few times where he didn't read the words very well... I'd say like an okay-ish version of "so and so" rather than perfect(ly). 🧐
Romanian is semi-phonetical langage: "i" can be vowel or semiconsonant: băieți, the bouth "i" are semiconsonant a opri the "i" Is vocal; o and e can be vowel or semiconsonant: seară, oară, here are semiconsonant, seră, oră are vowel. X can be read as "ks" or "gz " ax, examen.
Hey, thank you for covering this, your content is amazing, keep up the good work.
romanians can understand italian much easier than the other way around. its called Asymmetric intelligibility if I remember correctly
I love that you tried Romanian. It's such a pretty language, but it gets forgotten. They need some love
What do you mean by „it gets forgotten”? It is spoken by about 25 million people in Europe!
@@GeorgeBuzii was born in Romania but after few years u moved to another country. When i go in vacation in romania, rarely, a lot of romanian people speak English what the f k. Doesnt make sense. You are romanian living in romania why you speak English with other romanians like you? Lol
@@GeorgeBuziA vrut să spună că mulți străini uită de română când vine vorba de limbile romanice și cam așa este
While French is the most Germanic romance language.. Romanian is the most slavic one in this regard
Definitely
Is the French numeral system Germanic or Celtic though? Or maybe it's Germano-Celtic? xD
@@AllahuSnackbar270 well it went gallo-romance (Gauls were celtic) first then the Germanic franks came and started using classical Latin with their Germanic accent so we ended up with sounds such as the famous French "R" with both Ɣ and X phonemes
Aside from some tiny regions in Croatia, Romanian is the _only_ Slavicized Romance language.
Edit: I am apparently wrong, as there is "Aromanian" and "Meglenromanian" in addition to Istriot in Croatia. My error.
With english being the most Romance germanic language
It's only right
You make so authentic videos! All cred and respect to you! Keep up the good work!
One of our top soccer teams has an Italian coach and before the match, there is a Q&A session where Romanian sports journalists ask the coach questions regarding his team, strategy, expectations, etc, and most of the time he understands the questions without needing a translator. The same team has a Portuguese player that has been naturalized and has become a romanian citizen and speaks relatively fluent Romanian. Last year a Brazilian player at the same team was giving interviews in Romanian.
Romanian is supposed to be linguistically closest to Sicilian of all the Italian languages. That probably explains your wizardry. The thing that throws me off with it is the article at the end of the words. They put ul as an article. They also have some form of declensions on there nouns. I think they have preserved the dative and the genitive. Great video.
Yes, the definite article in Romanian is suffixed, but only for masculine as far as I know. It is probably because of the Balkan Sprachbund influence. Albanian and Bulgarian also have suffixed definite articles.
The definite article is enclitic (at the end) regardless the gender.
femeie => femeia (woman => the woman)
casă => casa (house)
case => casele (houses)
cafenea => cafeneaua (coffee shop)
All feminine, all form the definite form by changing the ending. I can't think of any example that doesn't work that way.
Which is all latin grammar!!
In Italian the article is formed from ille homo = il uomo, while in Ro
manian it's homo ille = omul. At least that's what I read somewhere...
@@NeolithiqKing dammit! That’s what I get for using text to speech. Yes, that is exactly what I meant. Thank you for pointing it out. I corrected it.
I heard from Romanian friends, that worked with Italians on cruise ships, that Romanians could understand basically most of what Italians were speaking (including dialects), while Italians were clueless about what Romanians were speaking. Italians were speaking Italian among themselves believing no-one could understand, but surprise. Fact is Romanians can understand Italian for the reason that Romanians are constantly exposed to Western Romance languages. All Romanians saw Spanish, Italian and French movies and heard Italian and Spanish songs, on the other hand, no Romanian language music of movies were popularized in Italy.
Fact is, even Italians, if exposed for a short while to Romanian and are curious to understand it and even learn it, they can do it in record time One example is Walter Zenga who was hired as manager of a Romanian team and to everyone surprise, in like a week he already responded to the reporters in broken Romanian. Because of that exposure to Italian languages, Romanians can understand Italian even easier than Aromanian, which is extremely close to Romanian and mutually intelligible if the ear and brain get used to it.
there is an anecdote when Romanians emigrated to USA New York
many didnt understand English but if Italian
and Romanians bought in Italian markets in New Jersey
Pot spune ca da, romanii pot intelege cat de cat italiana chiar daca nu o stiu. Exemplu tatal meu, a stat in Italia pentru cateva luni si deja stia mai mult de 20% din limba vorbita
Exactly. Because we saw the movies we understand better, you need to listen often to see the similarities
Not quite the romanian grammar is based on the Latin roots,they put the indefinite article on the end of the word (obtained tru the influence of slavonic language) and the definite is like in in the other romansche languages,the problem is the vocabulary which is realy a mix up,latin,slavonic,greek,turkish,hungarian,german etc.
@@ver_idem It is the definite article that is postponed. e.g.: Indefinit un lup , Definit lupul. It is not Slavic influence because the Slavic languages don't have definite article, except the Bulgarian language which was influenced by Romanian, when they assimilated the (Proto-) Romanian/Vlah population. In everyday speach most of the words are still of Latin origin, because the basic vocabulary is inherited from Latin.
Your reading was spectacular!
Glad you think so thanks
As a long time romanian subscriber its nice to see this. Love your interpretantion as a first time listener. You are a natural.
It's a little bit harder than other Romance languages, but not by much.
Once you learn all the basic words that sound different, it all starts making sense.
I love Romania, I used to work there and still visit as often as I can.
Romanian is arguably the easiest Romance language to learn in its entirety(that is writing, speaking and reading) because it's among the few languages in which your write the words exactly the same way that you speak them
@Shiftinggers Such things happen usually to languages that have come up with a writing system pretty recently. Romanian discontinued the use of the letters of its forefathers at the end of the 19th century and started using Latin.
@@Shiftinggers "it's among the few languages in which your write the words exactly the same way that you speak them"
Uuuuh most European languages are like that more or less. Maybe not entirely but once you know the rules they are rather predictable.
I am half ukrainian, my mother speaks both russian and ukrainian and my grandmother is a russian teacher.
The slavic component in romanian is in fact small and not the reason for you and most western romance speakers having issues understanding romanian as well as you would understand other western romance languages.
Romanian sounds ''slavic'' because of many if not most romanians having an eastern european accent, which is unsurprising since a large part of their ancestors were dacian (thracian) speakers, with dacian (thracian) being an eastern indo-european langauge. A lot of the roman, latin speaking colonists and soldiers would have also been of thracian, illyrian, etc (eastern european) heritage.
The reason why romanian is harder to understand is simply it being an eastern romance language.
Most words you do not understand are in fact words of latin origin, but because they evolved so differently, they are now hard to understand for a western romance speaker.
For example, the romanian word for ''soil'' is ''pamant'' from latin ''pavimentum''. The romanian word for ''old man'' comes from the latin word ''veteranus''. The romanian word for ''country'' comes from the latin ''terra''. Romanian is also the only romance language to have kept the ancient latin ''basilica'' (in romanian the word for church is ''biserica''). To give a few examples.
So indeed your hypothesis that understanding latin would help understand romanian better than understanding modern romance languages is very likely true.
Man, brilliant argument. And as a plus for your words I would add that Romanian is the only Latin language which took diacritics like " Â, Ă, Î, Ș, Ț " which are really spoken (Ex: Șarpe (RO) --> Serpente (IT) and in where the "Ș" is really pronounced like a sort of whispering - "ȘȘȘ").
The Slavic component is nowadays small but before they were many, many. I mean before the effort to inject French loanwords deleting "Slavic" words. According to the Romanian historian Neagu Djuvara more than 50% of the official dictionary (DEX) are French loanwords. They were injected in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Words in what language were deleted?
@ronaldmcmaster9148 The percentage you are referring to is somewhat debatable because some or many borrowed words may have a multiple Latin origin (Italian, French, or even Latin). Also, Romanians, since they did not have much contact for centuries with the Western Romance world, they caught up with their Western kindred during the 19th century. The same process took place in France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal centuries earlier, when these cultures borrowed massively from classical Latin. So, it's all good!
@silviu.serban Your comment reads like a good wishy-washy rationalization for the intentional process of de-slavization of the language. Also, do your own research on genetic studies and see where Romanians stand on the proximity diagrams relative to their neighbours (particularly the southern ones) and compare with Italians and the rest of the Romanic peoples. You'll see no Western kindred.
@@ronaldmcmaster9148 dependends what romanians. Transvanian romanians are mostly r1b y haplogroup and mtdna as well they stand closer to peoples like italians and austrians than the other romanians. Which isnt surprising since thats where the vast majority of roman coloniss were.
What is undeniable is the roman colonization had a major effect on our genetic ethnogenesis.
Ancient authors describe dacians as being redhaired pale blueyed people.
Modern romanians look rather mediteranean because they largely are.
Google myheritage romanian dna and good luck finding a romanian without something like 1/3 mediteranean (italian, greco-italian or iberian), there are very few.
The only historic event possibly responsabile for this genetic Shift is the roman conquest and colonization.
The only other notable admixture romanians had was with the original slavs which themselves were nordic.
Haha you shocked me with that intro! Fellow romanian here, love your videos! I'm usually able to understand around 30-40% italian. Also, don't be shocked by the first video, his romanian is very informal
Very good reading , good job 👍
Many years ago, when emails didn't exist, my family in Italy hosted a Romanian. From the stamps on the envelopes we received that period from Romania, we found out that posta romana (which in Italian means Roman Post) means Romanian Post.
Except for diacritics
Well yes, technically the Romanian word for "Romanian" is just a natural evolution of "Roman".
Our modern word for "Roman" (the ancient ones) is a neologism that we made in order to scholarly differentiate between us and them.
That's because up until the 18th century we made no mental difference between ancient romans and romanians, simply accepting that we were a continuum.
In romanian, "posta romana" also means roman post. However, written properly "poșta română" means romanian post. Also, "poșta romană" is how you write roman post correctly.
@@real_nosferatu Poșta Română
@@tr909love yeah
I love this kind of content. I can't wait for you to try out Catalan and Occitan.
I think he would have an easier time with those. He already has an understanding of the Piedmontese dialectic.
I am well in the minority, being one who regards the various dialects of the area from northern Italy to eastern Spain as dialects of a completely separate language. Call it Greater Occitan if you will. It is almost entirely Latin influenced by Gaelic, as I understand it. The differences between them are in the different dialects spoken by the Gauls of those areas, plus the fact that the Gauls of Catalonia had been influenced to some extent by Carthagenian. I don't know if Catalonia was ever under Moorish control or for how long, ergo I don't know how much Catalan was influenced by Arabic. Guessing that it's not much, as Catalan and Occitan are mutually intelligible.
It makes sense, that whole area of the western Mediterranean coast has ancient connected roots.
I guess it was political happenstance that the ancestors of modern Spanish and French came to dominate their smaller, and very distinct linguistic neighbors in the region.
Yeahh I like to see that with real old Occitan language, it will be interesting 😅
@@user-mr2lv2fq8g It doesn't even have to be old Occitan. Modern Occitan would be much easier to find and react to.
Finally you made a video about Romania. Well done.
Foarte frumos video-ul , mi-a placut in special partea in care ai citit!
There are a lot of Romanian words with Latin Orgin that you didn't recognized but, surprising, you read them correctly (this words have similar correspondence in Italian ) :)
Right...i notest that to. 😉
Maybe because of this fixation people in the west have with Romanian being a "Slavic romance". This mith which is sadly influencing their perception of our language.
Yes, I don't really know Latin and don't know Italian and I recognised some words like apă stătătoare - aqua stationarius that he didn't.
@@adapienkowska2605or țară (country/land) which comes from Terra.
@@adapienkowska2605 Yup, nailed the meaning square on the head(but as a small correction aqua being feminine the adjective would be stataria). The fun part regarding the word apă is apparently not certanly the Dacian word for water was upa or uba, funny how related the indo-european languages really were/are. It's even funnier/interesting that in Iranian Zoroastrian texts, there's a deity called Apam Napat(apam=of the waters napat=nephew(as in grandson), and in Romanian nephew is nepot, and in Latin nepos -> Italian nipote.
Exactly, its not that Romanian has too many words coming from Slavic, but that a lot of the vocabulary has different latin roots
Romanian language is still surrounded by many misconceptions (even in Romania) but it is always nice seeing it getting more coverage. I would vote for Catalan or Corsican next.
The one major misconception (not even in Romania but particularly in Romania) is that all Romanian Latin-derived words are the product of natural evolution. The renowned Romanian historian Neagu Djuvara stated that more than 50% of the Romanian vocabulary (in the DEX, official dictionary) is French loanwords. Just imagine. In the 19th and 20th centuries the Romanian intellectual elite basically changed the nature of the language from ...... to Latin-based (Romance language group).
@@ronaldmcmaster9148 Ironically we first adopted French language and culture because of the Russian aristocracy.
@TheGreyPeregrine The Russian aristocracy was all nuts about the French. In fact, French was extremely popular throughout the whole world, kind of like English is now.
@@ronaldmcmaster9148I was readimg ‘War and Peace’ and I just can’t believe how much french they were using despite they were in war against ….France (Napoleon). Didn’t make sense at all😅 I was really surprised.
@@ronaldmcmaster9148 This is a complete lie. There was an attempt to do this, but it has failed as even intellectuals decried it. The result is slavic words still being there, and Romanian only gaining a couple of French neologisms, scientific terms and salutes. You make it sound like Romanian is the closest to french as of 2023. I wonder what do you stand to gain from spreading this lie to every other comment? This lie that was obviously constructed to slander the Romanian language needs to stop being spread. It's an insult to both the slavic family of languages and Romanian, trying to form this idea that Romanian is not a true language but a fake one, and that the slavic components would actually "soil it". It's so obvious that this is the vicious goal. Stop spreading this myth.
As a Romanian this made my day🦍💪😤 And u man should try to eat romanian specialities sarmale, and mici(WITH MUSTARD, IS A MUST)best romanian cuisine right there mate. Romanians Gods thank you again for making this clip, may you sir live a happy life.
It was epic hearing you speak my language!! 🇷🇴
I was surprised to hear Russian, Polish and Czech as your first associations when thinking of Slavic influences to the Romanian language. I would have thought of Bulgarian and maybe Serbian and Ukrainian.
Ukrainian had little influence on Romanian but Serbian and Bulgarian is where the loan words mostly come from
Russian barely influenced Romanian , almost all Slavic words from Romanian came from Serbian , Bulgarian and old church Slavonic
We have a lot of Romanian workers here in Czechia and sometimes when I hear them from far distance, it really sounds slavic to me, some of them are actually Moldovans and use even Russian a lot, so it's everything so confusing. But good thing about Romanians is that their accent and pronunciation is not that far from Czech, yes, they sound more italian or something and they have broken grammar, but they are able to pronounce Czech pretty well after some time, which is not the case with Ukrainians or Russians, their accents are too far from Czech even when they are slavic speakers and Romanians not. What I totaly hate is when they are trying some Russian to communicate with us, that's really annoying becasue we don't understand it and I am consused then because I don't know if they are Romanians, Mldovans, Ukrainians or what. Why can't they just try English? Everything would be much more easier.
It's you the one who is right, Metatron is not a linguist and he only knows basic info about other languages, Romanian in this case. It's the Bulgarian language that influenced the Romanian language and so is the case the other way around. Most of the slavic influence comes from the old church slavonic (Bulgarian Orthodox Church), which was spoken in the church we've followed for a few centuries. Turkic languages and Hungarian have also influenced it a bit, and probably Serbian, though not much. Russian, Polish , Czech and Ukrainian have barley to no connection with the Romanian language.
@@PidalinWhen you hear Russian spoken by Romanians then they are “Moldovans” (from Republic of Moldova). Romanians that live outside the former Soviet borders don’t usually speak Russian.
Also English is more common in Romania as a second language while in Moldova Russian has the second spot. So the guy that addressed you in Russian probably doesn’t know another international language so he tried his luck with Russian.
I think that you actually understood more from the spoken Romanian that you did from Portuguese :-)
And for reading it would help to know that ce/ci/ge/gi and che/chi/ghe/ghi work exactly as in Italian. And ț is tz, so "forțele" reads exactly like in Italian.
My parents watched RAI without ever learning Italian, and got about 80%. I get more because I also speak French :-)
To be fair, in the Portuguese episode he didn't try Easy Portuguese, which I think he should try.
You will be amazed but we Romanians in general have less trouble understanding Italian or Spanish and even French at first hearing then they have with Romanian. That is most likely due to the fact that Romanian grammar is the closest to Latin.
Personally I was a bit surprised that Metatron started this video having this prejudice most western people seem to have nowadays that Romanian is a Slavic romance language. I think it closed his perspective and made him look for things that were not there while he missed things that were obvious. 🙂
@@yuzan3607he did try easy portuguese/simplified portuguese =P he saw Brazilian videos!
(Estou zoando irmãos brasileiros xD)
@@AlexandruBurdato be honest, it's not really a prejudice, at least for educated people.
It's the accent that somehow makes people think it's a "Slavic" language.
For example, most people in Italy, when listening to a Romanian person speaking Italian, think it's about a person coming from East Europe (about myself, I think I'm able to distinguish).
It's a matter of accent
@@davidemaglio5745the truth is always in the middle, is never white or black. The truth is that romanian grammar is hard, the words are latin origin very similar to latin and italians Spanish etc dont know latin and we have an eastern accent. That's it.
Salut! Ce mai faci? :))) Love your videos and keep up the great work!
Te salut prietene ! Un viddeo excelent ! Ca de obicei îmi plac foarte mult videoclipurile tale ! Sunt pasionat de hema și de istorie. Practic antrenament de tăiere cu spada exersând tehnici de scrimă medievală și am învățat multe din videoclideoclipurile tale !
Excellent video! As a Romanian, this was immensely fun to watch! Impressive reading skills, it was satisfying to see you decipher the texts.
What throws foreigners off is the diacritics (the absence of which helps Italian be more intelligible for us), which you can easily get around in reading as you did, but in speaking it takes a while to figure them out. I made this experiment with an Italian friend once, and while I could understand her Italian much better than she could understand my Romanian, we started to communicate quite well once she figured out some patterns, like Italian "pi" becomes "pl" in Romanian, as in "piange" - "plânge", and that disregarding diacritics makes it much easier because they're often just "pasted" over Latin roots ( for instance "înțelege” ("understand") is related to "intelegere").
Whenever foreign friends heard me speak Romanian, they all said they were surprised to learn that it sounds much more like Italian than like Russian (which people assume is sounds like), especially in intonation, but it's an Italian they couldn't understand anything from.
A long time ago I wanted to learn Romanian so I went to the Bible society shop in my city and actually got the whole Bible in Romanian and was surprised to how similar to Latin it was (I also got the latin Vulgate Bible there) I still can remember whole sections of it without having the faintest idea of how to pronounce the words properly! I can still remember the repeated refrain from the "Book of Revelation" - "Cine o urechi ze asculte che dice bisericilor Duhul" (excuse spelling) Which in English means "prick up your ears and listen to what the lord has to say to the churches (The 7 churches of Asia.) From my knowledge of Latin I was able to work out that "biserica" came from the Latin "basilica" and Domnul came from "Dominus." There were however a lot of very unfamiliar words which were probably Slavic or Turkic in origin like toiag as in toiag de fer (rod of iron) and vrajmaj which means enemy. The caveat with the biblical language however is that the translation is likely to use archaic words - similar to learning Italian from listening to opera arias or learning English from reading Shakespeare or the King James bible.
Best argument to refute @ronaldmcmaster9148 ridiculous claims.
that's not just archaic romanian, that is purposefully flamboyant archaic romanian
nice. Cool video! greetings from Romania
The first guy you watched spoke very fast and a lot of words just ran into each other. If you don't know the language, then it would be hard to tell where one word ends and the other begins, which I imagine is one reason why you had more trouble understanding him. He also used a lot of what I would term "filler" words that I don't really think have a direct translation outside of Romanian and they are akin to umm, uhh, ahh, etc. That would also make it more difficult to pick out any familiar words.
I'm Romanian and I needed subtitles to understand everything from that guy
@@vincentstef5708 Lol
Same here. He looked like he snorted something before making the video or he really needed to go to the bathroom. Bad choice for a non-native to try and understand anything from him.
Those "filler" words are actually called "thinking sounds" or sounds of thinking... It's interesting to check how and why they differ between languages (eg. in English is "hmm" in Romanian is "ǎǎǎ" in Spanish is "eee", etc)
He had bad diction and quite a marked accent.
As an italian, I find romanian a cool language. The knowledge of latin helps a lot. Ciao. Fai video molto interessanti. Complimenti.
Ah, what a trip this was as Bulgarian, that also knows Italian to a certain level (I can find my way it Italy without speaking English, no problem).
The first thing that caught my attention is the pronunciation - Romanian and Bulgarian pronunciation seems to be almost identical and that was very surprising l considering how much of an trip the Italian pronunciation was for me to learn as it’s totally different (at least the standard one I studied). In here we tend to use a lot of closed, muted and barely voiced sounds almost exclusively, whilst in Italian it’s much more open, voiced and clear. Didn’t expect that at all.
Vocabulary - some words were almost if not the same as in Bulgarian, but a lot of words were very Latin. Of course some words like Mare (More in here, pronounced Mure) are Latin words in Bulgarian and a lot of other languages as well.
Grammar - didn’t pay much attention as I was getting stuff by the context, I guess it should be quite close to other Romance languages grammar. And Bulgarian grammar is kinda … special even in the Slavic group, anyway.
This was very interesting, best of wishes to our Romanian 🇷🇴 neighbours, we love you, folks and to our Italian 🇮🇹 friends, we love you too.
1 Big like for you and 1 for your T-shirt. Grazie from Romania! 🤟
You're definitely a wizard! 😂 I'm romanian. At one point i had a medical procedure in Italy, there were complications, had to spend six months there, i understood almost everything since day one. After a month i was able to speak to the doctors myself and make myself understood. What you don't understand you can kinda piece together frok context. I'm 100% sure it'd be the same for you if you soent a month here. Thanx for the clip, really enjoyed it!
Romanian as far as I know is the only modern romance language to retain any form of noun inflections (i.e. cases). What's also interesting is that the definite article is added to the end of words, so "shield" is "scut", and "the shield" is "scutul". Anyway, Romanian music has randomly entered my life on a couple of occasions. The first was "Dragostea Din Tei" (the "Numa Numa" song, though I guess technically that was Moldovan?), the second was a church in the city of Oradea (BBSO) that's really good at music that popped up in a choir & orchestra playlist I had found on UA-cam.
Modavian language its not a separate language. Its Romanian language. 200 yrs ago russia took half of Moldova province and tried to replace Romanian language with Russian language by inserting a lot of slavic population. Standard procedure. It didn't work. What its worth to mention its that Italian language IT'S NOT Italian language. Italian language its Toscana dialect . There are about 30-34 dialects in Italy that does not resemble with each other. What's weird its that this Toscana dialect its the only dialect that resemble the most with Romanian language. Same thing in France , French language its Parisian dialect . What's weird its that the old French resemble with old Romanian. Different from Italy and France, in Romania there are no dialects . Historically, Romanian language was a unitary language spoken and understood by everybody everywhere in any time. What its difficult in Romanian language its loan words . We can say in 2-3 ways a word. For example...support, in Romanian language we can say "suport" or "sprijin" or " proptit". Or hour...in Romanian its "ora' or "ceas"
Moldovan is Romanian and Moldova is Besserabia
Romanian is the official language of Moldova since March 2023. They were forced by Russia to use "Moldovan", but with the war in Ukraine it had been possible to get rid of a lot the Russian intrusion.
You Know What Metatron? Im 5 minutes in, and as a french speaker, I think I have a better ear for accents that you. It's not meant trop brag but I can distinguish Latin words that you don't. I've realized this during your videos about Portuguese and it shows that being able to decipher the pronunciation is really important. you can know the words but if you can't hear them you are doomed. I don't even speak either Italian nor Portuguese, but I can easily repeat anything that I hear, with any accents.
I'm surprised at how many latin words that are similar to italian words he didn't understand.
Nice Video. You did a great job at understanding most of the words Congrats
I enjoyed your video...Very funny..You are very pleasent person
I am currently live on São Miguel island on Azores Portugal and the pronunciation is quite similar to Romanian. I think I understood more words :D
For a second there I thought the Romanian was Italian, or some obscure Romance dialect somewhere in Central Europe ... except Romanian isn't so obscure, and it is in Central/Eastern Europe! Even the delivery, with the up-down intonation and gesticulation, struck me as very familiar. I'm a Spanish- and Portuguese- speaker mostly, with some Latin and French.
I wonder if the tzara word comes from terra, where the e turned the t into a ts sound. "din" is just "dentro"/"dans", inside, "prin" is "perto"/"proche", "care" is "qual"/"quel", "timp" is "tempo"/"tiempo"/"temps", "noaptea" is "noche"/"noite"/"nuit", and of course there's "stele" - "estrella"/"estrela"/"etoille". They tend to turn the Latin "c/qu/gu" into a "p" so "noctum" -> "noptea", "aqua" -> "apa", "lingua" -> "limba". They also suffix the direct article, "-ul" instead of putting it at the front of the word, so "l'habitat" -> "habitatul", or, apologies to my Romanian readers for conjuring an unwanted association, "il drago" -> "dracul", "the dragon". You also have to remember that since the 19th century upper registers of the language tended to borrow very enthusiastically from French, which I suspect is why people say "superb" or "genial", although the Slavic element never disappeared. For example, they still say "da", for "yes".
This is huge to Romanian viewers! Thank you!
Your prononciation is soo good. I have heard from an italian that we have a lot of words in common with the southern italian dialect
Sicilianu or Nnapulitana?
@@bramantyoprahoro7284 I don t know. The one where "onion" is "ceapa"...
Hi there, Romanian here. I think another explanation why you start to understand Romanian better and better after each video is because on first video it was your first contact than you start being more familiar with it, I could call it passive learning, like how toddlers start learning a language. A lot of 90's kids start learning English from cartoons and movies because they were not dubbed in Romanian. So yeah hypothetically if you have a long time contact with Romanian you will learn it naturally. This also happens to me when I was in Italy, I started to know a little bit of Italian.
You re speaking very good in Romanian,cool video,by the way i am a Romanian and im currently learning Italiana 🇷🇴❤🇮🇹🤗,italiana its a beautiful language in my opinion
You probably won't get the chance to read this, but it may help you to better understand spoken Romanian knowing one simple thing: "Q" Latin words have been "transformed" into "Č" words. In consequence you have the usual Latin "que" which is "ce" in Romanian (pronounced "če"). Same situation with "qui", etc. Going a bit further, using this little piece of information you will understand that "aceasta", pronounced -ačasta- means 'questa". (Aceasta seara = questa sera). The only Romanian word that comes to mind starting with the letter Q is "quintala" which apparently now has the correct form of "chintala".
As a general rule, as stated in other comments also, it's much easier for you to understand written Romanian because of all the slavic, turkish and some greek influences in our pronunciation.
It is not sure that the pronunciation is influenced by Slavic, but he is familiar with Napoletan language that sounds even more "Slavic" than Romanian.
Țară is of latin origin from Terra, means country in Romanian but definitely influenced by Slavic. That might be the reason you couldn't get what it is😂❤
How is that influenced from Slavic? Where country is "strana" and land is "zemlia"?
It isn't the influence of Slavic but just a natural evolution of language. We can trace the progression from the palatalization of t into c from an original Tjerra, then a vowel shift e to a, and you get the modern Romanian word. Something very similar happened in Portuguese. This is why Portuguese can sound a bit Slavic at times.
@@mihainita5325These are Russian words, not common Slavic. In most Slavic languages country is something similar to Kraj and land is some variant of Zema.
Influenced by what?
Ţară, ţarină, ţăran, ţărână are Thracian/Dacian in origin, they have nothing to do with the Slavs.
Whoever analyses Romanian are always forgetting that few hundred words are coming from before Latinisation of Dacia…from the Dacian language.
@@elimalinsky7069 Maybe, I did not check them all (meantime I did, it's about half and half between kraj / zemlia :-)
But none of them seem related to Romanian "țară". Terra does. Which was my point.
I got the impression the first guy was speaking with a lot of slang and vernacular accent compared to the middle video being the more "standardised" version of the language and so easier to understand
Romania loves you Met🙌🏻 salutes from Transylvania
You actually did pretty good. I’m impressed 😉
The way I got so happy when you posted this for the Romanian language. I thought you will not do it for Romania since it’s a less known/popular country than the others, imagine my surprise when you did. I was litteraly smiling the whole video.
I’m not sure if you already know, but I’ll say that Latin does help in understanding Romanian more in my opinion. Seeing that the Roman Empire conquered the then Dacia (now presently Romania) and Romanised/Latinized the people there.
Also “nu stiu” (sorry for not writing it with the correct “s”, my keyboard doesn’t have it :/ )means I don’t know.
Nice video! You should do more videos with Romanian language or maybe history…? If you want to/can. Love your reaction when you were understanding the language!
Yup exactly! In Romanian nu stiu = ne scio in Latin.
@@UlpianHeritor Yes. I think nu comes from nōn though, like in the other Romance languages.
Spanish and Polish speaker here. In my opinion, the Slavic influence is overstated. Yes, the Balkan Sprachbund is at play, and they have "da" for yes. The linguistic evolution from Vulgar Latin led to many shifts, which is to be expected. I agree a command of Latin is important, not just a particular Latin based language. It's a fascinating language cocktail with various ingredients, Latin being the primary, with Slavic being but a jigger for subtle notes. I understood just as much as you did. My Polish and Russian knowledge only helped with da and kraj. Great video!
You good, Only by listening our language you get it, Thanks sir :D finally someone that is using they're big brains.
I have watched a video on UA-cam with 4 Latin speakers from different countries, while one of them was talking in Romanian. The amazing thing was that they all understood Romanian as this language is the closest to Latin and many of the words were kept.
Hei! 🙌Salutare! 👋 You got it 👏 Your level of pronunciation/ understanding Romanian language is amazing. I believe you can learn it in few months.
You choose the wrong video to watch! :)) I think some news were more suited.
mi dispiace che hai scelto 3 video pessimi sinceramente 😂
sono rumeno e vivo in Italia da 20 anni questo mese e ti posso assicurare che se senti parlare qualcuno in rumeno corretto e lentamente, capisci quasi tutto, sicuramente capisci il contesto interamente anche se ti mancano delle parole
ad ogni modo grazie mille per aver provato, mi sono divertito un sacco, ottimo video, ottimo canale, contenuti veramente top, bravissimo, ti prego continua così, ho fame di sapere sempre di più, complimenti
And I, as another native Romanian speaker couldn't disagree with you more and I can assure that these videos were very authentic reflecting how Romanians speak. It is of course possible, with some knowledge of other Romance languages, to adapt the speech of the Romanian language using almost only words an Italian would understand+speaking with a very slow speed to make it even easier. How extraordinarily authentic Romanian would that be, right? This guy in this video is one of view who has created an authentic Italian-Romanian language challenge and he deserves all respect for that!
Salutare !
Thank you for making a video about my language.
Romanian means Romanus. Citizen of Rome.
Romania comes from the name of the regio Romagna. This region was called Romagna just like the one in Italia.
Great video!
Silviu 🤝
Romanian here, you are hitting it my man! The kids were not using geographical references which are confusing for someone who has not visited România and you basically understood everything, all that remains is for you to visit!
As a French speaker i understood just as much as an Italian would. No more, no less.
eg. Un loc preferat = un lieu préféré /une localité préférée.
But you can clearly discern the Latin roots of the language. It's interesting how they managed to keep their roman linguistic heritage after almost 2 millenina and how it's worlds apart from their direct neighbours like the Bulgarians or Magyars.
They didn't keep that much. It was relatinized in the 18th and 19th century to sound more like French and Italian. If it looks amazing, it's because it's wrong. The language would have sounded Slavic/other influences if it wasn't for the intervention.
@@NeolithiqKing I listened to Aromanian and could barely understand it, maybe like 25%. I don't know why you people keep claiming you understand most of it. The fact of the matter is that Romanian would have sounded just like Aromanian if it wasn't for the intervention and Aromanian sounds nothing like French and Italian. I speak both languages and I can tell you that there's much more French influence than in any other language given that France was hegemony at the time. And if you think there's less than 2% Italian, well... There's no point in even arguing with you.
@@lynxlecher9547 @NeolithiqKing
Well it's a fascinating quarrel. I've learned much. Mulțumesc.
@@NeolithiqKing I don't believe that you do, you just claim you do for whatever reason. I listened to a bunch of Aromanian videos and I couldn't understand more than 25%. I read comments and they said they understand 95%. You're all lying.
@@gabriel4596 Don't trust my fellow Romanians, they're
❤❤❤ your reading in Romanian was great, my guess is that you will speak fluent in a couple of weeks if you visited Romania!
what a great idea! i am very interested in how familiar languages sound for each other. Thank you for doing this! Maybe you found a "new science" beside of established linguistics as it is based on "history", not based on the actual language.
Metatron, i never thought the day would come, when i'll hear you speak Romanian. Great video my friend. Also, it's really funny how as a native Romanian speaker i can understand quite a bit of Italian and Spanish, but can't say the same for Italian/Spanish speakers:)
Colloquial Romanian language uses a mix of slavic and latin words. Sometimes, there are senteces that are pure latin based. "Ei sunt amicii mei. = Loro sono i miei amici." sunt=sono/lat. sum / sunt , it. loro becames => lor/ a lor = their's. In a more elevated academic speach, we use more latin , italian, french vocabulary. Romanian vocabulary has around !5% slavic words, but most of these words have sinonimes from latin, Italian or french because in the 19th century we had a language reform, trying to distance ourselves from the slavic world, finding our Latin roots. Even Romanian dialets separated from us and still found in Greece or Croatia , like Aromanian, Istro-Romanian or Megleno-Romanian still have a degree of inteligibility with Romanian with lots of latin based words and grammar., Aromanian being the most inteligible for someone with no lingvistic skill. For someone that knows Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan or Latin learning Romanian in 2 months is nothing. The biggest difficulty you have to overcome, is like in Portuguese, the accent, the second one is a motive to learn it....
Aromanian is very similar to the Romanian spoken in both R of Moldova and Romania's region Moldova.
@@CapitanDePlai Yes. I know, because I'm Romanian.
There was no "language reform that tried to distance themselves from the Slavs" in the 19th century", that's a fallacy that keeps getting repeated for some reason.
@@wallachia4797 DA, DA, PRIETENE, IUBESC limba Romana insa VREMEA a trecut si tot ZABOVIM in PROSTIME.... 🙂
@@johndoes7569 ?