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.
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".
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!
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. ;)
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!
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.😅)
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.
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 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
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.
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 :)
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 :-)
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. 🙂
@@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.
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 RUclips.
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.
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:)
As a Romanian I have no idea what Mogu Mogu is ... and you have chosen a pretty difficult video to understand ... he speaks fast, he rushes his words ... it is not easy LE I was actually cheering for you when you got to the shield article on wikipedia. That was really good
I think romanians understand more italian than italians understand romanian. Even though only 10% of our vocabulary consists of latin words, they constitute the core elements of the language, like the main verbs (like "a merge", which means to walk in romanian but to swin in latin, and the way we tweaked some words is intriguing on its own). A linguist once said that if you were to remove every foreign component the language could still technically be functional, meanwhile if you only removed the latin it would immediately become disfunctional. I once heard a speech on tv from italy and I understood half the words, in most cases being like instead of "Balon" (Baloon) it would be Balontrice, using your example. Thanks for covering us. (P.S: The different letters are the following: Ț is pronounced like zz in italian, like in Pizza Ş is like sh, like Shit in english Ă us uh...look it up I wont bother explain  is like a deep sound of pain, again look it up Î is same as Â, theres some history behind Î and  but they are the same)
i don't know where you got that 10% from, but it's completely wrong, over 68% of romanian words have a latin origin and when you break it down to the most commonly used words, it jumps up to 77%
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
Hah, I have been following you since your channel was small, but it was so cool to hear you speak and read romanian. You read it and spoke it very well.I think that you could learn a lot of romanian in a few months if you wanted to, considering that you know japanese and many other languages.I think that if one knows latin, it's even easier to understand romanian, as there are many words that are still the same words from vulgar latin. Love all of your videos btw :).
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.
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'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!
Haha, you sound better than many of my fellow Romanians that left the country in the last years. :)). I think the pronunciation makes the difference in the first video, because he speaks very quickly and maybe you cannot distinguish the words clearly. Lots of love from Ro! Esti foarte tare 👏
forta = forza. It is pronounced the same. Forta is written with the letter Ţ - T-cedilla which is pronounced tz. I'm surprised that Metatron met two times the word apa and it didn't make the association with acqua. mare = sea. marea = the sea. Romanian kept the way Latin makes the definite noun, at the end of the word: house = domum; the house = domus. Hen = gallina; the hen = gallinae But, as usual, a very honest, fun and useful video.
DA, my friend, can just as likely be derived from the Latin word ITA --- which was an affirmative used by Roman soldiers in Dacia (aka Romania today). "DA" throws this analysis off from the git-go due to the glaringly obvious cognate in Russian, for instance. But behind this bluff, the Romanian DA --- just might be Roman / Latin after all !! Gratias, amicus meus. c.
As a Romanian who lives in Italy, studied Latin and now is getting into Russian, I can give you some advices. As an Italian speaker, just remember a few things to make Romanian easier to understand: - Most words from Latin just lost their final desinence. One example is "lupum" (= wolf) or "circus" in Latin whose desinence was cut off, the same as "scutum" during the video. - In some words there is the passage from L to R like the word "miere" which means honey in Romanian (in Italian "miele"). - The D sound becomes the Italian S of "casa" (= house). A good example is the world "zii" which can be translated in Italian as "dí" (= day). - A lot of double consonants in Italian are just the old Latin sounds in Romanian. For example, "massimo" in Italian becomes "maxim". The same rule applies if the S is followed by a consonant, like the Italian word "estendere" which becomes "a extinde" in Romanian (= to extend). - The A at the end of feminine words becomes Ă (similar to the end of "butcher" in English). If you hear sometime the A at the end it means it has the article. Try with the Italian word "lampa" and you will get it. This happens sometimes even if the A isn't at the end, like "sărat" (in Italian "salato" and it means salty). - If the A is between two consonants sometimes becomes  (= ы in Cyrillic Alphabet). It is quiet complicated to explain but, for example, if the seconds consonant has a sound between the teeths (like N) and the first one not, that  appears. An example is the Italian word "cantare" which becomes in Romanian "a cânta" (= to sing). There are some other words like "mână" (= hand) or "hârtie" (= paper). Just remember: not all the words follow this pattern. However, if in Romanian the word is from Latin you can be mostly sure with its meaning if there is that Â. - The H is always pronounced like the word house in English. In some Latin words it replaced the hard C of coat, especially if it has Greek origins. - A lot of words with Latin origin have its Slavic pair. To have an easy example, there are two forms to say glory: "glorie" (in Italian "gloria") and "slavă" (in Russian славa). The same works with "stradă" and "uliță" (= street). - There are some false friends too! An example is the word "veste" which in Italian means some kind of clothing/a role and in Romanian has its Slavic roots and means news, update. Here's another one. In Italian "fortuna" means luck. In Romanian there is a similar word "furtună" which has its Turkish origins and it means storm.
Sono molto convinta che per us as romanian is more easy to understand every Latin language even we don’t speak very well every specific language ! I realize this traveling with out knowing or studying specifically italian/ Spanish/ portughez, I study English and france ( but my france is very bad ) anway I don’t have many troubles to understand a little bit of german! As i say I really think thatthe Romanian have a real ability to understand more languages even we don’t studied ! Of course if everyone is talking to fast is more difficult to understand but also we are making the connection between the situation or what the subject is talking about ! Very nice your video ! 🙂
I'm loving this series and hope you do more! I'm curious about Occitan and Romansh. I'm Portuguese and I understood about the same as you, except that for some reason when it came to the kids I understood less and not more. From the comments I learned they're actually the ones from Bucharest and have the most proper accent. It's kind of strange to me then, maybe it means Romanian and Portuguese are indeed drifting quickly further apart?
"Chestii" literally translates to "cose" in Italian but also it's similar to "questioni" in Italian......we have "chestiune" also in Romanian. Questione is a synonim for "domanda" in Italian where as we in Romanian use "chestiune" for problem...also Italians do it: "Questione di sicurezza"/"Chestiune de siguranta" for example.
first video he is speaking fast .... i had friend that was Italian growing up and we both came to Canada when we were young so he spoke to his parents slowly and that made it easier for me to understand
Probably he would understand less. Lots of words from Serbian, Macedonian, Greek, etc. Lots of terms that we use to learn from school or tv would be from the respective country’s language, Slavic or Greek, in the way that the speaker learns them. I mean scientific, technical, medical etc. terms.
Hi Metatron , I'm William, I enjoy your videos, and I would like to answer some of your questions: 1. Listening: not only words, but also regional accents and pronountiacion will affect your level of comprehension of the language. The first video had an accent from the Eastern part of Romania, which is more difficult. Same happened with me and Catalonian, I didn't get a thing at first, whilst after some days I could understand almost everything (I don't speak Catalonian by the way)). Romanian accents are very different by the way, and it is a real debate if the "Romanian" spoken in my region (in the Banat) is the same language as the one spoken in other areas, due to the fact that it is much older, it has a lot more in common to vulgar latin, and a lot closer to Italian, Galician, Portuguese, Romantsch or Catalonian (I speak Galician by the way and understand Portuguese). 2. That word you didn't understand was "țară" which means land/country, it is pronounced tsara and it derives from latin: terra. The ț is pronounced like a ts, identical to the sound z in Italian. Also ș for example is the same sound as sh in English. 3. "Da" although identical to the slavic "da", might be actually not that slavic in Romanian. Keeo in mind that a way to agree in Portuguese is "ta", coming from the latin "ita". So the romance populations living in the Balkans might have just used the "ta", which made it easy to transform it in time in the word the neighbouring Slavs used, whith the same meaning. So "da" is Slavic? Yes, but it was adopted because the Romance population already used a very similar word.
The problem is that Romanian and Italian usually use different words from Latin for the same things. Me as romanian while listening or reading to italian, i understand almost 50/70%, and always understanding the meaning of the sentence.
Bună, Metronom. I am one of your Romanian die-hard fans and greatly enjoy all your videos. I appreciate that you dedicated this one to Romanian language. We Romanians also understand about 70 % of an Italian discourse/text.
@CobraKaiNoMercy L evolved to R in Romanian - so miel -> miere (feminine), and miel (lamb) is derived from agnus, agnelus - the gn-sound evolved to 'm'. Cal (horse) is derived from caballus *cheval in French and there is also armasar - admissarius *the breeding horse /this is what a ladiesman or male sex bomb is called. 'amar' comes from the latin amarus *bitter, and means bitter. Noce, nocciola in italian has the same meaning as nuca in Romanian. The rest are words of a different origin.
Yes, knowledge or Latin might help more than knowledge of Italian. I'm far from an expert in Latin, just had it in uni 100 years ago, and as a Norwegian it seems I actually understood a bit more than you . Perhaps it's just the outside perspective, dunno :)
Wow, so cool! Keep on going. I'm native from Moldova, and so I speak Romanian but I live in Italy and understand very well English 😂this video is so good!
15:58 the "ț" in "forțe de ordine" is pronounced the same as the "z" in "forze" by the way, so that one was closer than it seemed to the italian word... I don't think you'll get to read these comments I'm leaving considering the amount of comments though lol
Romanian here. The problem with Romanian for westerners(romance speakers) is exposure. There aren't any tv shows or movies in Romanian for you to hear and find similarities. Where as for us, Romanians, that is not an issue: we seen planty French, Italian, Spanish etc shows and movies, thus it is easy for us to understand anyone in these languages. I.e. I understand almost anything in Italian and my only contact was Italian TV channels when I was a kid - Italia Uno, Italia Quattro e Cinque - I remember watching Fantozzi, Rei Arthur e la cavaleri dela tabola rotonda, Scherzzi Aparte (don't know if the spelling is right) etc. My advice, watch a Romanina movie, or one you already know doubled in Romanian, and you'll notice how close the languages are. I had an Italian house mate in London, and after two years living together he told me he is understanding what I was speaking with my parents over the phone.So yeah, exposure.
As a Native Spanish speaker that never have studied other romance languages, i can understand Portuguese and italian to some level with with context, but french and romanian are on other level.
The first video was made by a fast speaker. Also some of the people weren't speaking correctly 😅. Mara is not same as Marea, also Mare means both sea and big in different contexts.
As a native English speaker who loves other languages I can pick a lot of context out of Dutch and German and a little out of other Germanic languages. But since English is highly latinized I can understand a good number of romance language words
Quick note: Romanina is not Latin. Latin is Romanina. You migh ask "how"? Tha Romanian language (more like Dacian) is from the roots where the original Latin has originated. (When the Roman Empire) tried to invate then know as Dacia, the people of Dacia spoke a totally different language ( Romans were like, "what language is that"???) Only Later after the conquest of Trajan of then Dacia, now know as Modern Romania, have the Roman churches have implemented the Lating Language. So you could say half or more was taken and adopted because if its actually different properties. They used it to keep secrets and also (have a new language". Hope that helps a little. Research if you dont believe me.
As a romanian native speaker it's funny to see you struggle here. I assume you were thinking a little too much in Italian instead of latin and other romance languages and you ended up missing a few obvious ones: putere - poder - power, care - qualle - which/that, ori - either/or (i'm not sure what the latin equivalent is), oricare (the composition of the previous two meaning any of). The reason why you couldn't understand the first guy was that he was speaking with a heavy accent and he was trying to sound cool which means he altered the rhythm of his speech a lot, muting some consonants and it required more concentration to follow even from me. What I found very interesting with regards to Romanian is that we have a cadence of speech that is quite similar to Turkish (as opposed to romance languages), but there is very, very little crossover in terms of grammar or in terms of vocabulary other than words imported from the turks to refer to Turkish culture items.
You could not understand much of the first two videos because the people in the interviews were speaking with different Romanian accents and not quite in the literary language. The kids(I'm old enough to call them kids :) were closer to the literary language. You've done so good with reading the text. I had the same experience this week as a German speaker hearing and reading the Dutch language. :) It is much easier in reading because you can interpret and process the words in your own pace, whilst with hearing you can only pick up the pieces.
I believe it's easier for a Romanian to understand Italian than the other way around. Because I'm less than a year since the Italian tv channels can't to Romania I was able to grasp 80% of Italian. And I was only 14. Probably because even if we use daily some Slavic or even Turkish words there are still the Latin equivalents as archaisms, being much easier for us to make the connection. I also believe that the more you hear, the more you understand. Even for an Italian.
Salve magister! Did you spend some time in Ro?( Ex DACIA) Like citybreak... Or maybe you are a teacher in latin languages, or a history one....and I don't know.... Nice try! Good vibe! Try again, but like a prof...demonstrated. All good!
You did great! On the 2nd video about the favorite places half of the words used were toponyms and not common words so, unless you know the actual names of the places, it would be extremely difficult to make sense of it. Another thing is that Romanian still maintains strong word roots from the Latin language which were slightly altered by one or a few letters in Italian. This is why it’s not easy to make the connections and a Romanian has a higher chance of understanding Italian than viceversa. Example: lupta is derived from the Latin lucta with 1 letter alteration while in Italian it evolved into lotta. Or the words diferit in Romanian and differente in Italian have their origin in the Latin verb differre (to differ) but the inheriance process was different. Easy to make the connection when in the nominative case. However Romanian also maintained the declension from Latin which changes the form of the word based on its function and place in the sentence, which the other romance languages lost and this makes it a bit more difficult to understand and make the connections with the nominative form used by the other languages
Tara, with the comma under the T and the brachet over the second a means country, she was saying "do you have a favurite place in the COUNTRY, in romania?"
I think that on wiki some letters were changed from what they're supposed to be because you were reading exactly like it. I think that "ț" bacame t, "ş" became s and "ă" and "â" bacame a
Another issue you would stumble upon besides non Latin words, because the language was isolated compared to the other ones, we use some latin root words that aren't used in other romance languages. For instance "padure", this means forest. If I remember correctly in italian and other languages you use "foresta" or something similar coming from (silva or foris). Well in romanian we have the word "Silva" but it's only used officialy like "Tran-silva-nia" or "Silvicultura" (forestry). The word "padure" comes from latin "padule" which means swamp. Or the word for earth as in mundus / mundo which is similar in all romance languages. Not in romanian, we say "lume" which comes from "lumos", meaning everything under the sun.
try this video as well! " Misteriosul rege al Valahiei și izvoare UITATE. Țepeș în fața PAPEI în 1475? [SUBTITRĂRI] " by Corpus Draculianum, I think you will like it very much
Something i noted as a native italian speaker is that romanian has two "ways of speech": for common speech the language is very far from Latin, but watching some science related videos in romanian or video of romanian politicians speaking i was understanding lot of the things that were said
You are smart .The first romanian dude had a a dumb and fast way to speak that's why u didnt't understand him,but for the rest of them u nailed it,bravissimo😊.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.😅
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)
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 )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!
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).
@@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
@craezee247 The older generations use amor and amic because they lived through a period of extensive borrowing from French and Italian into the Romanian language (the intellectual elites wanted to bring the Latin-based vocab as high as possible; above 50% certainly; they succeeded). That's what they know.
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.
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.
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 !
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
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. 🙂
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.
@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.
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
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.
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.
Come on!.. 15:45 "învechit" - that became... vechi, as in "vecchio"; obsoleto. I remember seeing once another... brave Latin speaker who didn't manage to understand "mic" and "alb" even these words are simply fully Latin "miccus" and "albus"... It has to be a mindset that blocks a western neolatin speaker from understanding this sort of words just on the spot!.. :-?
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% 😄
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 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.
Romanians will always understand italian better than italians will understand romanian. Because both countries have a latin background, but italians have way less influences from other languanes, unlike romanians with heavy turkish ,slavic ,slavonic, hungarian, germanic etc. For example when an italian will say caverna or grotta (ex. cave) , romanians will understand because they have synonims for it also (ex. grotă, cavernă), but when romanians will say peşteră (ex. default word for 'cave'), italians will not understand.
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
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...?
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
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.
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 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💀💀💀💀
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!
The most awesome thing was your Romanian pronunciation. It was 89% perfect. Thank you so much for doing this, Metatron. Cheers!
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.
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...
As an italian, I find romanian a cool language. The knowledge of latin helps a lot. Ciao. Fai video molto interessanti. Complimenti.
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.
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?
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"...
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.
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 RUclips.
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.
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:)
As a Romanian I have no idea what Mogu Mogu is ... and you have chosen a pretty difficult video to understand ... he speaks fast, he rushes his words ... it is not easy
LE I was actually cheering for you when you got to the shield article on wikipedia. That was really good
I think romanians understand more italian than italians understand romanian. Even though only 10% of our vocabulary consists of latin words, they constitute the core elements of the language, like the main verbs (like "a merge", which means to walk in romanian but to swin in latin, and the way we tweaked some words is intriguing on its own). A linguist once said that if you were to remove every foreign component the language could still technically be functional, meanwhile if you only removed the latin it would immediately become disfunctional. I once heard a speech on tv from italy and I understood half the words, in most cases being like instead of "Balon" (Baloon) it would be Balontrice, using your example. Thanks for covering us.
(P.S: The different letters are the following:
Ț is pronounced like zz in italian, like in Pizza
Ş is like sh, like Shit in english
Ă us uh...look it up I wont bother explain
 is like a deep sound of pain, again look it up
Î is same as Â, theres some history behind Î and  but they are the same)
10% of mindblowing "dacopatitis" a spiritual illnes among the rumanians.
i don't know where you got that 10% from, but it's completely wrong, over 68% of romanian words have a latin origin and when you break it down to the most commonly used words, it jumps up to 77%
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.
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
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.
Finally you made a video about Romania. Well done.
Hah, I have been following you since your channel was small, but it was so cool to hear you speak and read romanian. You read it and spoke it very well.I think that you could learn a lot of romanian in a few months if you wanted to, considering that you know japanese and many other languages.I think that if one knows latin, it's even easier to understand romanian, as there are many words that are still the same words from vulgar latin. Love all of your videos btw :).
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.
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'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!
Haha, you sound better than many of my fellow Romanians that left the country in the last years. :)). I think the pronunciation makes the difference in the first video, because he speaks very quickly and maybe you cannot distinguish the words clearly. Lots of love from Ro! Esti foarte tare 👏
forta = forza. It is pronounced the same. Forta is written with the letter Ţ - T-cedilla which is pronounced tz.
I'm surprised that Metatron met two times the word apa and it didn't make the association with acqua.
mare = sea. marea = the sea. Romanian kept the way Latin makes the definite noun, at the end of the word: house = domum; the house = domus. Hen = gallina; the hen = gallinae
But, as usual, a very honest, fun and useful video.
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
DA, my friend, can just as likely be derived from the Latin word ITA --- which was an affirmative used by Roman soldiers in Dacia (aka Romania today). "DA" throws this analysis off from the git-go due to the glaringly obvious cognate in Russian, for instance. But behind this bluff, the Romanian DA --- just might be Roman / Latin after all !! Gratias, amicus meus. c.
As a Romanian who lives in Italy, studied Latin and now is getting into Russian, I can give you some advices.
As an Italian speaker, just remember a few things to make Romanian easier to understand:
- Most words from Latin just lost their final desinence. One example is "lupum" (= wolf) or "circus" in Latin whose desinence was cut off, the same as "scutum" during the video.
- In some words there is the passage from L to R like the word "miere" which means honey in Romanian (in Italian "miele").
- The D sound becomes the Italian S of "casa" (= house). A good example is the world "zii" which can be translated in Italian as "dí" (= day).
- A lot of double consonants in Italian are just the old Latin sounds in Romanian. For example, "massimo" in Italian becomes "maxim". The same rule applies if the S is followed by a consonant, like the Italian word "estendere" which becomes "a extinde" in Romanian (= to extend).
- The A at the end of feminine words becomes Ă (similar to the end of "butcher" in English). If you hear sometime the A at the end it means it has the article. Try with the Italian word "lampa" and you will get it. This happens sometimes even if the A isn't at the end, like "sărat" (in Italian "salato" and it means salty).
- If the A is between two consonants sometimes becomes  (= ы in Cyrillic Alphabet). It is quiet complicated to explain but, for example, if the seconds consonant has a sound between the teeths (like N) and the first one not, that  appears. An example is the Italian word "cantare" which becomes in Romanian "a cânta" (= to sing). There are some other words like "mână" (= hand) or "hârtie" (= paper). Just remember: not all the words follow this pattern. However, if in Romanian the word is from Latin you can be mostly sure with its meaning if there is that Â.
- The H is always pronounced like the word house in English. In some Latin words it replaced the hard C of coat, especially if it has Greek origins.
- A lot of words with Latin origin have its Slavic pair. To have an easy example, there are two forms to say glory: "glorie" (in Italian "gloria") and "slavă" (in Russian славa). The same works with "stradă" and "uliță" (= street).
- There are some false friends too! An example is the word "veste" which in Italian means some kind of clothing/a role and in Romanian has its Slavic roots and means news, update. Here's another one. In Italian "fortuna" means luck. In Romanian there is a similar word "furtună" which has its Turkish origins and it means storm.
With "veste" you didn't get it right, because in Romanian it's "vestă", so very similar.
Sono molto convinta che per us as romanian is more easy to understand every Latin language even we don’t speak very well every specific language !
I realize this traveling with out knowing or studying specifically italian/ Spanish/ portughez, I study English and france ( but my france is very bad ) anway I don’t have many troubles to understand a little bit of german! As i say I really think thatthe Romanian have a real ability to understand more languages even we don’t studied !
Of course if everyone is talking to fast is more difficult to understand but also we are making the connection between the situation or what the subject is talking about !
Very nice your video !
🙂
As a Romanian i find this really entertaining to watch cuz its really interesting to watch people finally recognize us
I'm loving this series and hope you do more! I'm curious about Occitan and Romansh.
I'm Portuguese and I understood about the same as you, except that for some reason when it came to the kids I understood less and not more. From the comments I learned they're actually the ones from Bucharest and have the most proper accent. It's kind of strange to me then, maybe it means Romanian and Portuguese are indeed drifting quickly further apart?
"Chestii" literally translates to "cose" in Italian but also it's similar to "questioni" in Italian......we have "chestiune" also in Romanian. Questione is a synonim for "domanda" in Italian where as we in Romanian use "chestiune" for problem...also Italians do it: "Questione di sicurezza"/"Chestiune de siguranta" for example.
first video he is speaking fast .... i had friend that was Italian growing up and we both came to Canada when we were young so he spoke to his parents slowly and that made it easier for me to understand
There are also Istro Romanians, in Istria, Aromanian and meglenoromanian, all over the balkans from north of Greece to albania, macedonia
They are languages of the Proto-Romanian branch
@@InAeternumRomaMater they are consider different languages and I would love if Metatron would do a video on them.
Probably he would understand less. Lots of words from Serbian, Macedonian, Greek, etc. Lots of terms that we use to learn from school or tv would be from the respective country’s language, Slavic or Greek, in the way that the speaker learns them. I mean scientific, technical, medical etc. terms.
Hi Metatron , I'm William, I enjoy your videos, and I would like to answer some of your questions:
1. Listening: not only words, but also regional accents and pronountiacion will affect your level of comprehension of the language. The first video had an accent from the Eastern part of Romania, which is more difficult. Same happened with me and Catalonian, I didn't get a thing at first, whilst after some days I could understand almost everything (I don't speak Catalonian by the way)). Romanian accents are very different by the way, and it is a real debate if the "Romanian" spoken in my region (in the Banat) is the same language as the one spoken in other areas, due to the fact that it is much older, it has a lot more in common to vulgar latin, and a lot closer to Italian, Galician, Portuguese, Romantsch or Catalonian (I speak Galician by the way and understand Portuguese).
2. That word you didn't understand was "țară" which means land/country, it is pronounced tsara and it derives from latin: terra. The ț is pronounced like a ts, identical to the sound z in Italian. Also ș for example is the same sound as sh in English.
3. "Da" although identical to the slavic "da", might be actually not that slavic in Romanian. Keeo in mind that a way to agree in Portuguese is "ta", coming from the latin "ita". So the romance populations living in the Balkans might have just used the "ta", which made it easy to transform it in time in the word the neighbouring Slavs used, whith the same meaning. So "da" is Slavic? Yes, but it was adopted because the Romance population already used a very similar word.
The problem is that Romanian and Italian usually use different words from Latin for the same things. Me as romanian while listening or reading to italian, i understand almost 50/70%, and always understanding the meaning of the sentence.
Bună, Metronom. I am one of your Romanian die-hard fans and greatly enjoy all your videos. I appreciate that you dedicated this one to Romanian language. We Romanians also understand about 70 % of an Italian discourse/text.
You choose the wrong video to watch! :)) I think some news were more suited.
Ironically in Czechia we don't usual Slavic "Da" for yes but "Ano" and "Ne" for "No"
romanian words have different origin from latin compared to western romance languages and it makes it hard to understand intuitively for others
@CobraKaiNoMercy L evolved to R in Romanian - so miel -> miere (feminine), and miel (lamb) is derived from agnus, agnelus - the gn-sound evolved to 'm'. Cal (horse) is derived from caballus *cheval in French and there is also armasar - admissarius *the breeding horse /this is what a ladiesman or male sex bomb is called. 'amar' comes from the latin amarus *bitter, and means bitter. Noce, nocciola in italian has the same meaning as nuca in Romanian. The rest are words of a different origin.
Man, as a Brazillian, Romanian souds to me like Italian for some reason, crazy!
nice nice, keep going, i'm romanian ;) Nice video ;)
Yes, knowledge or Latin might help more than knowledge of Italian. I'm far from an expert in Latin, just had it in uni 100 years ago, and as a Norwegian it seems I actually understood a bit more than you . Perhaps it's just the outside perspective, dunno :)
Wow, so cool! Keep on going. I'm native from Moldova, and so I speak Romanian but I live in Italy and understand very well English 😂this video is so good!
15:58 the "ț" in "forțe de ordine" is pronounced the same as the "z" in "forze" by the way, so that one was closer than it seemed to the italian word... I don't think you'll get to read these comments I'm leaving considering the amount of comments though lol
Romanian here. The problem with Romanian for westerners(romance speakers) is exposure. There aren't any tv shows or movies in Romanian for you to hear and find similarities. Where as for us, Romanians, that is not an issue: we seen planty French, Italian, Spanish etc shows and movies, thus it is easy for us to understand anyone in these languages. I.e. I understand almost anything in Italian and my only contact was Italian TV channels when I was a kid - Italia Uno, Italia Quattro e Cinque - I remember watching Fantozzi, Rei Arthur e la cavaleri dela tabola rotonda, Scherzzi Aparte (don't know if the spelling is right) etc.
My advice, watch a Romanina movie, or one you already know doubled in Romanian, and you'll notice how close the languages are.
I had an Italian house mate in London, and after two years living together he told me he is understanding what I was speaking with my parents over the phone.So yeah, exposure.
As a Native Spanish speaker that never have studied other romance languages, i can understand Portuguese and italian to some level with with context, but french and romanian are on other level.
The first video was made by a fast speaker. Also some of the people weren't speaking correctly 😅. Mara is not same as Marea, also Mare means both sea and big in different contexts.
As a native English speaker who loves other languages I can pick a lot of context out of Dutch and German and a little out of other Germanic languages. But since English is highly latinized I can understand a good number of romance language words
Quick note: Romanina is not Latin. Latin is Romanina. You migh ask "how"? Tha Romanian language (more like Dacian) is from the roots where the original Latin has originated. (When the Roman Empire) tried to invate then know as Dacia, the people of Dacia spoke a totally different language ( Romans were like, "what language is that"???) Only Later after the conquest of Trajan of then Dacia, now know as Modern Romania, have the Roman churches have implemented the Lating Language. So you could say half or more was taken and adopted because if its actually different properties. They used it to keep secrets and also (have a new language". Hope that helps a little. Research if you dont believe me.
As a romanian native speaker it's funny to see you struggle here. I assume you were thinking a little too much in Italian instead of latin and other romance languages and you ended up missing a few obvious ones: putere - poder - power, care - qualle - which/that, ori - either/or (i'm not sure what the latin equivalent is), oricare (the composition of the previous two meaning any of).
The reason why you couldn't understand the first guy was that he was speaking with a heavy accent and he was trying to sound cool which means he altered the rhythm of his speech a lot, muting some consonants and it required more concentration to follow even from me.
What I found very interesting with regards to Romanian is that we have a cadence of speech that is quite similar to Turkish (as opposed to romance languages), but there is very, very little crossover in terms of grammar or in terms of vocabulary other than words imported from the turks to refer to Turkish culture items.
Its so funny when you read romanian with your italian accent, it sounds like latin to me. Really enjoyed the video!
You could not understand much of the first two videos because the people in the interviews were speaking with different Romanian accents and not quite in the literary language. The kids(I'm old enough to call them kids :) were closer to the literary language. You've done so good with reading the text. I had the same experience this week as a German speaker hearing and reading the Dutch language. :) It is much easier in reading because you can interpret and process the words in your own pace, whilst with hearing you can only pick up the pieces.
And the way you repeat the words and what you hear is very accurate. So from the way you repeat the words you can see that it is very similar
Omaigawd! This is so cool. Multumim! How is your reading so good WTH!
To my untrained ear, out of all modern Romance languages, Romanian sounds the most like Latin.
Apa is water
I believe it's easier for a Romanian to understand Italian than the other way around.
Because I'm less than a year since the Italian tv channels can't to Romania I was able to grasp 80% of Italian. And I was only 14. Probably because even if we use daily some Slavic or even Turkish words there are still the Latin equivalents as archaisms, being much easier for us to make the connection.
I also believe that the more you hear, the more you understand. Even for an Italian.
Can italian understand how to "NOT BE RACIST", not only towards romanians, but in general? hahaha
Salve magister!
Did you spend some time in Ro?( Ex DACIA) Like citybreak...
Or maybe you are a teacher in latin languages, or a history one....and I don't know....
Nice try! Good vibe!
Try again, but like a prof...demonstrated.
All good!
0:20 i think you remembered some OTHER links... Don't think there's either of the two you've mentioned at that point. 🤓
You actually did pretty good. I’m impressed 😉
You did great! On the 2nd video about the favorite places half of the words used were toponyms and not common words so, unless you know the actual names of the places, it would be extremely difficult to make sense of it. Another thing is that Romanian still maintains strong word roots from the Latin language which were slightly altered by one or a few letters in Italian. This is why it’s not easy to make the connections and a Romanian has a higher chance of understanding Italian than viceversa. Example: lupta is derived from the Latin lucta with 1 letter alteration while in Italian it evolved into lotta. Or the words diferit in Romanian and differente in Italian have their origin in the Latin verb differre (to differ) but the inheriance process was different. Easy to make the connection when in the nominative case. However Romanian also maintained the declension from Latin which changes the form of the word based on its function and place in the sentence, which the other romance languages lost and this makes it a bit more difficult to understand and make the connections with the nominative form used by the other languages
Tara, with the comma under the T and the brachet over the second a means country, she was saying "do you have a favurite place in the COUNTRY, in romania?"
I think that on wiki some letters were changed from what they're supposed to be because you were reading exactly like it. I think that "ț" bacame t, "ş" became s and "ă" and "â" bacame a
10/10 for use of Metallica tshirt ! ;)
Another issue you would stumble upon besides non Latin words, because the language was isolated compared to the other ones, we use some latin root words that aren't used in other romance languages.
For instance "padure", this means forest. If I remember correctly in italian and other languages you use "foresta" or something similar coming from (silva or foris). Well in romanian we have the word "Silva" but it's only used officialy like "Tran-silva-nia" or "Silvicultura" (forestry). The word "padure" comes from latin "padule" which means swamp.
Or the word for earth as in mundus / mundo which is similar in all romance languages. Not in romanian, we say "lume" which comes from "lumos", meaning everything under the sun.
try this video as well!
" Misteriosul rege al Valahiei și izvoare UITATE. Țepeș în fața PAPEI în 1475? [SUBTITRĂRI] " by Corpus Draculianum, I think you will like it very much
Something i noted as a native italian speaker is that romanian has two "ways of speech": for common speech the language is very far from Latin, but watching some science related videos in romanian or video of romanian politicians speaking i was understanding lot of the things that were said
I enjoyed your video...Very funny..You are very pleasent person
You are smart .The first romanian dude had a a dumb and fast way to speak that's why u didnt't understand him,but for the rest of them u nailed it,bravissimo😊.
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.
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
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
Cerise/cireșe, coricare/culcare
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
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 )
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😅
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”
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!
@@hirogochitomayto7018 HAHAHAHA.. .
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!
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).
@@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
@craezee247 The older generations use amor and amic because they lived through a period of extensive borrowing from French and Italian into the Romanian language (the intellectual elites wanted to bring the Latin-based vocab as high as possible; above 50% certainly; they succeeded). That's what they know.
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Come on!.. 15:45 "învechit" - that became... vechi, as in "vecchio"; obsoleto.
I remember seeing once another... brave Latin speaker who didn't manage to understand "mic" and "alb" even these words are simply fully Latin "miccus" and "albus"... It has to be a mindset that blocks a western neolatin speaker from understanding this sort of words just on the spot!.. :-?
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% 😄
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 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.
Romanians will always understand italian better than italians will understand romanian. Because both countries have a latin background, but italians have way less influences from other languanes, unlike romanians with heavy turkish ,slavic ,slavonic, hungarian, germanic etc. For example when an italian will say caverna or grotta (ex. cave) , romanians will understand because they have synonims for it also (ex. grotă, cavernă), but when romanians will say peşteră (ex. default word for 'cave'), italians will not understand.
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