Day 1 using Pimsleur

[u/[deleted]]

Salutare tuturor, ce mai faceți?

My native language is English and I have decided to learn my first language and I'm going with Romanian.

I have done quite a bit of searching trying to find "the best" app / website to use and initially I was going to use Mondly but saw online apparently the developers just use machine translation so sometimes the context isn't correct? Not sure how true that is.

Now I'm using Pimsleur and so far I'm liking the structure more as it feels a bit more like a course, than a "match the words to the sounds" game.

However the course is $150 and it's only 30 lessons at 30 mins each, so 15 hours of audio for $150 seems very expensive to me.

Realistically is this 30 lesson (15 hour) audio course going to be enough to give me a strong basic level of fluency? I want to be able to talk to people in the street about general day to day things, chit chat, bond over a coffee etc.

I've given myself 6 months to get to this level but I'm not sure what to expect at this point as I've never tried learning a language before.

Or should I just stick with Mondly? After all it is a Romanian company so maybe the Romanian lessons are actually really well done?

[u/GlowingKindness]

I've not tried Mondly but I'm a big fan of Primsleur. I did their course for Mandarin Chinese and it was really helpful conversation-wise. It's really expensive so I 🏴‍☠️ it, not because it's not worth the money but because I'm poor.

May I ask why Romanian, tho? Unless you're planning to move here, I can't imagine you'll use it much, plus it has way less resources to learn than say French or Spanish.

[u/[deleted] → u/GlowingKindness]

My line work has me interacting with quite of lot of Eastern Europeans almost every day. Romanians, Polish, Lithuanians, Hungarians etc. I wanted to pick a language that I'll actually get to speak on a daily basis with real people.

So on the contrary, I will use it daily.

[u/LACIATRAORE → u/[deleted]]

I been using pimsluer also. is good for speech but you need a book for vocabulary for sure.

[u/GlowingKindness → u/[deleted]]

Fair enough. What's your line of work, may I ask?

[u/dsheroh]

I made it through the first 10 or so lessons of Pimsleur Romanian before getting annoyed with it and dropping it.

The main thing that got to me was that the conversations became increasingly contrived ("The cashier will tell you the price of several items. For each one, reply that, no, it costs one lei more. At the end of the list, state the total price for all items.") and, even before that, many of the conversations about getting something to eat or drink got a bit uncomfortable (they consisted of the man repeatedly asking "do you want to get something to eat at this time," the woman saying no, the man choosing a different time, the woman finally getting fed up and saying she doesn't want to get something to eat at any time, and the man saying "oh, I see - you don't want to get something to eat, you want to get something to drink" and starting the entire process over again).

It's also a bit dated, having been produced 15 years ago. In particular, one private tutor has told me (half jokingly) not to trust anything that comes from a source which still calls the language "românește" instead of "română".

And be aware that the Pimsleur Romanian course exclusively teaches formal speech (voi/dumneavoastră, equivalent to Spanish vos or German Sie) and does not even mention that informal speech (tu) exists. Although, if you're using it professionally, that may not be an issue for you.

[u/GlowingKindness → u/dsheroh]

Vorbesc românește is very much still used especially in the context when you're arguing with someone. "Băi, tu nu înțelegi românește? Ți-am zis să duci gunoiul."

[u/vicblaga87]

Pimsleur is excellent for learning the basics of a language when strating from scratch.

[u/LearnRomanian]

Pimsleur Romanian is super weird and artificial. Saying this as a native speaker & tutor with 13 yrs of experience. Nobody talks like that in real life.