
Learning Romanian - DanielRibeiro
http://jacquesmattheij.com/learning-romanian
======
jliechti1
I've had the most success with Spaced Repetition Systems when I create the
cards myself, and the cards are all material that I am _reviewing_ , not
something I have never seen before.

I think this makes a large difference for foreign language learning. I never
focus on learning words. I always learn words in the context of a sentence. I
choose my sentences by taking them from things people say, books I read,
videos I watch, etc...This is especially helpful because when I review the
sentences in the SRS sometime later, I will read the sentence and almost
always recall the broader context in which I learned it (the page in the book,
the scene in the movie). This works really well for learning how to use words
(and idioms especially) in their proper context.

Mnemosyne is my SRS of choice: [http://mnemosyne-proj.org/](http://mnemosyne-
proj.org/). Very customizable, but a lot easier to get started with than Anki.
It's a local app, so no Internet needed, like Memrise. The one downside is no
good mobile app version.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, context is _everything_. That's one thing that really strikes me about
learning this way, the lack of context. But that should be fixable.

~~~
steveridout
Hey, it sounds like you might be interested in my webapp for reading to learn
foreign languages: [http://readlang.com](http://readlang.com)

It lets you:

\- Upload texts to read, even entire novels, or read any webpage using a
bookmarklet.

\- Click on words or drag across phrases to translate them.

\- Every word or phrase you translate is stored to your account, along with
the context sentence, to learn with flashcards.

\- Flashcards are prioritised using word frequency lists so you learn the most
useful words first, they also use a SRS similar to Anki to schedule future
appearances of a word.

Please give it a try, and if you are interested it could be cool to share some
ideas.

------
jacquesm
Very much worth reading is this post by gwern:

[http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition)

(I've been reading that and the tons of references from there pretty much all
day since writing that post).

------
octopus
For me, best approach to learn a new language is to read a book in parallel in
both languages. I tend to use novels that were translated in both languages,
this way I won't get into trouble with the way a particular writer uses the
language. Imagine trying to learn English by reading Faulkner or Mark Twain.

For e.g, say that you are Dutch and want to learn Romanian, you buy a novel by
Dostoyevsky (since this was written in Russian you can be sure it was
translated in both languages) that you read before (this way you won't pay
much attention to the story) and read it in parallel Dutch/Romanian.

------
dirktheman
I don't speak a single word of Romanian, but it seems similar to italian and a
little french. I can read a newspaper and 'get' the meaning of the articles,
for instance. It's an amusing language, not slavic at all like its
neighbouring countries. Good luck learning Romanian! Side note: the Danish
have a similar word to 'gezellig': 'hygge'.

~~~
jacquesm
I know a fair bit of Polish and keep seeing Slavic influences, but that could
- now that I think about it - have been just as easy the other way around.

Makes you wonder if Russian picked up 'Da' from the South or if that somehow
crossed over from the North. Most other Roman language use totally unrelated
terms for 'yes' or general affirmation.

~~~
amgaera
In the article you mention that Romanian isn't the hardest thing you’ve
learned. Has any of the other European languages you know (Dutch, German,
Polish) been more difficult?

~~~
mobiplayer
I've often heard that Finnish and Hungarian are probably the hardest european
languages to learn. I don't know any, but I've got some Hungarian friends and
the few bits I've been teached don't show the opposite :)

------
cbg0
You need to make sure what you're learning is actually what you think you're
learning; The blog post says "sobolanul" means "rat" but it actually means
"the rat", "sobolan" is "rat".

~~~
threedaymonk
That's just the convention in how words are presented to learners in different
languages, I think, and it's surely obvious to anyone with even a few minutes
of exposure to Romanian that -ul is one of the enclitics for the definite
article.

Anyway, I don't know that's even a useful distinction on its own. The
difference between "the X" and "X" doesn't map very well across languages,
even within Europe. English drops the article in many circumstances in which
Romance languages use it.

------
Dewie
I use Memrise for the spaced repetition part. In the courses that I'm taking,
the mnemonic techniques (associating pictures or whatever to new words) are
just flat out horrible.

