Is Romanian hard to learn? Challenges, advantages & tips from a City Lit Tutor

Romania has a way of opening its arms to a stranger. Its national poem, Miorița — the shepherd's ballad every Romanian child learns by heart — begins with a hillside standing at the very threshold of paradise. That's a fitting way to describe how the country tends to greet newcomers, language students included: with generosity, warmth, breathtaking natural beauty, and no shortage of good food pressed into your hands.

Keep that image in mind as you read on — because cracking the language is really only half the story.

Ask most British students to place Romanian on a map of Europe, and they'll point somewhere vaguely east — past Vienna, past the Balkans, into a fog labelled "somewhere over there."

Ask them what language family it belongs to, and the guesses tend to cluster around Slavic, or "something to do with Dracula."

Understandable. Romania sits at the crossroads of empires — Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, surrounded by Ukrainian, Hungarian, Serbian and Bulgarian neighbours. It looks, on paper, like it ought to be difficult.

Is Romanian a difficult a language?

Here's the short answer: Romanian is not the easiest language in the world, but for English speakers, it's far more approachable than its geography suggests. It has a few grammatical quirks that will make you pause. But underneath them sits something rather lovely — a language built on the same Latin bones as French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, dressed up in Eastern European clothing.

Learning it feels a little like meeting a cousin you didn't know you had: family resemblance in the face, unfamiliar accent, entirely worth getting to know. I teach both French and Romanian, and I've spent years watching students walk in expecting a linguistic assault course and walk out charmed. This article draws on that teaching experience — the real questions learners ask, the real mistakes they make, and the real moment, usually around week four, when something clicks.

Why do people think Romanian is difficult?

The reputation isn't baseless — it's just misplaced. A few things conspire against Romanian:

• Geography plays tricks on the mind. Because Romania is surrounded by Slavic-speaking countries, people assume the language must be Slavic too. It isn't.
• Slavic influence is real, but only skin-deep. Centuries of contact with Bulgarian, Serbian and Ukrainian left their mark on Romanian vocabulary and a handful of sounds — but the grammar, and the great majority of everyday words, remain thoroughly Latin.
• Romanian is generaly less visibile. Spanish has Netflix. French has croissants and Paris fashion week. Romanian has neither the marketing budget nor the tourist board of its Romance cousins, so fewer people study it, and fewer resources exist — which quietly reinforces the myth that it must be obscure and hard.
• Most people don't know it's a Romance language. This is the single biggest perception gap. The moment a student realises Romanian shares roughly 75% of its core vocabulary with Latin, the fear tends to evaporate.

Perception, in other words, is doing a great deal of work that difficulty itself hasn't earned.

What makes Romanian easier than you might expect

An Oasis of Latinity

Here's the metaphor I use on the first day of every course: if the Romance languages are a family gathered around a Mediterranean table, Romanian is the relative who moved abroad long ago and comes back speaking with a slightly different accent — but still unmistakably one of the family. Romania has often been described as an island of Latin culture surrounded by a sea of Slavic-speaking neighbours, and that image genuinely helps once you start noticing the vocabulary.

Notice how Romanian sits comfortably in that row — closer to French and Italian than you'd guess from hearing it spoken. If you already have some French, Spanish or Italian under your belt, a surprising amount of Romanian vocabulary will already feel like a half-remembered word rather than a brand-new one.

A Familiar Alphabet

Romanian uses the Latin alphabet, with just five extra letters carrying diacritical marks: ă, â, î, ș, ț. That's it. No new script to learn, no characters to memorise from scratch — unlike, say, Russian's Cyrillic or Greek's own alphabet, both of which sit geographically much closer to Romania than French or Spanish do. You can start reading Romanian street signs, menus and headlines on day one.

Pronunciation You Can Trust

Romanian spelling is largely phonetic: what you see is, with very few exceptions, what you say. Compare that to English, where "though," "through," "tough" and "thought" all torment the same four letters differently, and Romanian starts to look positively merciful.

A quick example: mulțumesc (thank you) is pronounced roughly mool-tsoo-MESK. Once you learn that ț makes a "ts" sound and ș makes "sh," you can read almost any Romanian word aloud with confidence, even ones you've never seen before.

The biggest challenges of learning Romanian

None of this is to say Romanian hands itself to you for free. There are real challenges — and being honest about them is more useful to a learner than pretending they don't exist.

Grammatical Cases

Romanian is the only Romance language to have kept a case system, inherited from Latin, that its siblings quietly dropped. Nouns and pronouns change form depending on their grammatical role — broadly, nominative and accusative (subject and object), genitive and dative (possession and "to/for"), and vocative (used for addressing someone directly). This is genuinely the biggest structural hurdle for English speakers, precisely because English abandoned most of its own case system centuries ago. French, Italian and Spanish speakers find it just as unfamiliar. It takes practice, not talent, and it becomes intuitive faster than most learners expect.

Definite Articles Attached to the Word

Instead of a separate word for "the" placed in front of a noun, Romanian attaches it to the end:

• băiat = boy
• băiatul = the boy

It's a small mechanical difference, but it briefly rewires how you scan a sentence. Give it two or three weeks and your eye adjusts.

Gender Rules — With a Twist

Like French, Italian and Spanish, Romanian nouns are either masculine or feminine. Unlike them, Romanian keeps a third category — neuter — inherited from Latin but reshuffled: neuter nouns behave like masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. It sounds odd written down; in practice, it's a pattern you absorb through repetition rather than a rule you consciously apply once you've heard it enough times.

Verb Conjugations

Romanian verbs conjugate for person, number, tense and mood — broadly similar in scale to French or Spanish conjugation, though the four verb groups and their irregularities take time to settle. The good news: the present tense, which is where every beginner course rightly starts, follows patterns that become predictable within a few weeks of regular practice.

How long does it take to learn Romanian?

Fluency is a moving target, and I'd rather give you a realistic map than a false promise. Progress depends entirely on consistency, not talent:

Casual learner (a couple of sessions a week, light homework)

You'll be able to introduce yourself, order food, and handle simple everyday exchanges within a few months — enough to travel with confidence and charm a Romanian grandmother at a market stall.

Dedicated learner (daily practice, structured course, regular listening)

Within a year of consistent study, most learners reach a solid intermediate level — comfortable in everyday conversation, able to read simple texts and follow the gist of a slower news broadcast.

Intensive learner (immersion, daily speaking practice, time in Romania or Moldova)

Working proficiency is realistic within twelve to eighteen months, though genuine fluency — the kind where you dream in the language — tends to take a few years of sustained use, as it does with any language.

The honest takeaway: aim for proficiency, not an arbitrary finish line called "fluent." Every session moves you closer.

Is Romanian harder than other Romance languages?

Romanian vs Spanish

Spanish wins on ease of pronunciation and sheer volume of available resources. Romanian wins on vocabulary transparency for English speakers, since a striking number of Romanian words derive from French and Latin roots that also survive, sometimes more clearly, in English. Grammatically, Spanish's verb system is arguably more demanding day-to-day than Romanian's, but Romanian's case system has no Spanish equivalent at all.

Romanian vs Italian

Italian and Romanian are close cousins in sound and rhythm — both musical, both vowel-rich. Italian's grammar is gentler on a beginner, with no case system to navigate. Where Romanian pulls ahead is in a certain unexpected familiarity for English speakers: centuries of French influence on Romanian vocabulary mean plenty of words that will already ring a bell.

Romanian vs French

This is the comparison closest to my own teaching life, and the one I find most instructive. French pronunciation is notoriously unforgiving — silent letters, nasal vowels, liaison rules that trip up learners for years. Romanian, by contrast, is refreshingly phonetic: you read it as it's written. Where French wins is grammatical familiarity, since it too abandoned Latin's case system centuries ago. Vocabulary-wise, the two languages are close relatives — French shaped much of Romania's modern vocabulary during the nineteenth century, when Bucharest deliberately styled itself "the Paris of the East."

None of this adds up to a ranking. Difficulty depends on which languages you already speak, and which kind of "hard" bothers you more — unfamiliar sounds, or unfamiliar grammar.

Tips for learning Romanian faster

• Speak from day one. Don't wait until your grammar feels "ready." It never entirely does — for anyone, in any language.
• Listen to Romanian media. Radio, folk music, film — even without understanding every word, your ear starts recognising patterns long before your brain can explain them.
• Learn high-frequency vocabulary first. A relatively small set of core words covers the overwhelming majority of everyday conversation. Master those before chasing obscure ones.
• Find a conversation partner. Structure teaches you the rules; conversation teaches you when to break them naturally.
• Use spaced repetition for vocabulary. Little and often beats occasional cramming, every time.

Common mistakes beginners make

• Avoiding speaking until it feels "correct." Confidence comes from use, not preparation.
• Over-focusing on grammar at the expense of listening. You can recite every case ending and still struggle to follow a real conversation if your ear hasn't been trained.
• Translating directly from English. Romanian word order and idiom often follow French or Latin logic instead — translating literally from English creates sentences that are grammatically odd, even if individually correct.
• Neglecting listening practice. Reading is not the same skill as understanding spoken Romanian at natural speed.

Is Romanian worth learning?

Beyond the practical case — family heritage, travel, a growing number of businesses looking to expand into Romania and Moldova, an EU member state with a fast-developing tech sector — there's a cultural case that I find genuinely moving to teach.

Romania's culture sits at a fascinating intersection: Latin language, Orthodox Christian tradition, Ottoman-influenced cuisine, and folklore that predates all of it. It's a country of painted monasteries in Bucovina, wooden churches in Maramureș, the wild beauty of the Carpathians, and a capital that once earned its nickname as "Little Paris" for its boulevards and belle-époque architecture. Learning the language opens a door onto Romanian poetry — Mihai Eminescu, the country's great Romantic poet, wrote verses on love and nature that Romanians still learn by heart in school, in a way that has no real English equivalent for sheer cultural saturation. It opens onto Romanian cinema, which has quietly become one of the most respected in contemporary Europe, and onto a folklore tradition of forests, wolves and vampires that gave the world its most famous fictional export — long before Bram Stoker ever got involved.

Learning Romanian, in short, is a way of understanding a country that refuses to fit neatly into either "Eastern Europe" or "Romance Europe" — and is all the richer for it.

Final verdict: is Romanian hard to learn?

Romanian is not the easiest language in the world — but it's significantly more accessible than most people assume before they start. English speakers gain a real head start from shared Latin vocabulary and a familiar alphabet. The grammar, particularly the case system and attached articles, presents genuine challenges, but they're manageable with consistent, structured practice — not obstacles that require any special gift for languages.

If you've been put off by geography, or by a vague sense that Eastern Europe must mean "difficult," it's worth reconsidering. Romanian rewards curiosity generously, and rather quickly.

And if that hillside at the gate of paradise from the opening of Miorița is anything to go by, Romania will be waiting for you with open arms long before you've mastered your first case ending. All you need to do is start.

Frequently asked questions

Ready to start? Learn Romanian at City Lit

City Lit's Romanian Beginners: An Introduction runs 24 October – 28 November and is designed for complete beginners and anyone wanting to rebuild their foundations from scratch. Over the course, you'll cover everyday topics — introducing yourself, family, food and drink, ordering in cafés, and asking for directions — alongside the core grammar covered in this article: present tense, articles, pronouns and prepositions. No experience needed, just curiosity.