Colloquial Romanian: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series (Book Only)) 4th Edition

This book does an excellent job of introducing the student to the Romanian language in reasonable, readily digestible stages. Explanations of grammar are accessible and comprehensible. Language study is integrated with the culture of modern Romania. A table of conjugations of most commonly used verbs at the end of the book is very helpful. Recordings of dialogues by native speakers are available for free on-line. Still, I do wish audio support was a bit more extensive.

Strangely, I was expecting a book of ribald sayings to spice up my Romanian learning and keep it from becoming boring. What else does one expect from a book titled "Colloquial"? But sadly it's only a series of language books, not what the book is about. OTOH it's a good book on Romanian apparently.It was first written in 1983. And it was last updated in 2012. The audio files are still downloadable from the website, but I suggest you use duckduckgo not google to find the website. Google just tells you it's not there instead of searching for it. Obviously after so many years it's moved a little bit. It's really nice of them to maintain it online like that. Even if you find the book at Goodwill you can still get the audio for it.As someone else has pointed out, the pronunciation section has at least one defect. "a" should be suggested as the vowel sound in the English word "awl" (the pointy tool used in leather working). So the author may speak poor English. Strange since the publisher is London/New York.There's an introduction that gives yet one more version of the story of the development of the language of Romania. I've read several by now. Each is different. This one makes the claim that it was the Greek Catholic (Uniate) church that Latinized the writing (abandoned Cyrillic). Actually a lot of the story sounds like oversimplification to me. This should not be surprising since the first edition of the book is before the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. But that's the first time I've heard that particular story.I'd like to find a first edition to read the introduction from 1983, just for the sake of curiosity. Basically, I don't buy their claims that there was no theater or literature before the 1800s, and then there was a sudden flowering. I mean, people who make painted churches don't have no theater in their soul.Truly it's sad that we have to have our antennas on and beware of biased and slanted views of eastern European cultures. But I'm afraid it will be a problem for decades to come. I suggest we toughen up and learn to spot it. For example:"...Eminescu who crafted an exquisite literary language from archaisms, neologisms, and dialect."Yes, well if it existed already, then he wasn't alone in "crafting" from it.Eastern Europe is a very diverse place with pockets of culture that have not been explored fully. The intro makes it sound like it's all been explained. That's the main problem with it. If we spend another 100 years on it, and do our best to free ourselves from bias, we'll only get halfway to the reality of it. For one thing, there have been more systems of writing present there than just Cyrillic and Latin.Just look at all the battles being fought now on its borders. Imagine the battles that were fought over the last thousand years, or several thousand. If we have a hundred years of peace, we may be able to find some truth. I hope for it.But you should hold the intro at arm's length and view it as rudimentary. Focus on the language, and don't use this one book exclusively, not even for the language itself.Also, the Romanian government has quite a lot of language learning tools available online for free. They're a bit wonky to find, but helpful when you get to a point where you want to listen to conversations and don't want to buy movies yet.

Well i have not much to say other than its great for beginners in Romanian

This probably is the best Romaninan text book available. It is very organized, and extremely well thought out. I would recommend anyone learning Romanin to use this text book.

The book would be a lot better if it taught everything before asking you to use it. For example in exercise three of chapter one, you are supposed to use the correct forms of the verbs to be and to have, only chapter one does not taech the verb to have... then the exercise uses vocabulary also not covered in the chapter, or even listed in the glossary! Perhaps the author's intent is to make you work harder by cracking open your dictionary and grammar book, but in my opinion this edition is very poorly written.

Son says its very good.

I am happy I read the reviews and bought an old version of this book -- 2nd edition 1995. I don't really care that it's not up-to-date. I don't expect to be able to speak like a native. The 1995 edition italicizes the accented vowel. This is really, really helpful. You can read whole paragraphs and know where to accent each word. As a textbook for a course, I'm sure the current edition is fine, but if you're teaching yourself, you'd be better off with the 2nd edition. The grammar is explained very well. Lots of nice chunks of text in Romanian. Aside from the Pimsleur CDs, this book has been the most helpful to me in teaching myself.

Dennis Deletant has provided an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to truly learn the language, especially in self-study. The book enables you to learn how to conduct many affairs in Romanian daily life.I recomend that you purchase the the book and cassette pack, the cassettes are definately a great aid. They will increase your comprehension twofold.There are several versions of the book available, the complete course (ISBN 0415129001) is the best buy. It includes the tapes and costs about 30 to 40 dollars.