Learn Romanian online

Not yet. We are preparing or assessing a future Romanian school. Register your interest and we will contact you when the first trial lessons or courses become available.

We do not yet have a confirmed launch date. Once our first teaching dates are fixed, people on the interest list will hear from us first.

We expect to offer both formats, although the first trial phase may begin with a more limited selection.

No. Romanian is a Romance language, descended from the Latin spoken in the Roman province of Dacia, which makes it a cousin of Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese. The confusion is fair enough: Romania is ringed by Slavic-speaking countries, and roughly 20% of Romanian vocabulary was borrowed from Slavic, mostly via Old Church Slavonic. But the grammar, the numbers, the pronouns and the everyday verbs are all Latin.

Romanian is one of the easier languages for an English speaker. The US Foreign Service Institute places it in Category I, its easiest group, alongside Spanish, French and Italian, at roughly 600 to 750 class hours to reach professional working proficiency. It uses the Latin alphabet, the spelling is near-phonetic, and shared Latin roots mean you will recognise plenty of vocabulary on sight. Noun cases are the genuinely hard part.

Reaching A1, where you can introduce yourself and manage simple phrases, is commonly estimated at around 60 to 100 hours of study. Conversational B1 is usually several hundred hours beyond that. The firmest figure available is the Foreign Service Institute’s: about 600 to 750 class hours of full-time instruction for professional working proficiency, which is far above what most casual learners actually need. Consistency beats intensity.

Because Romanian’s sounds picked up Slavic habits while its structure stayed Latin. Romanian spent centuries geographically cut off from the other Romance languages and surrounded by Slavic neighbours. It has a “sh” sound written ș, a “ts” sound written ț, and central vowels (ă, â, î) that Italian and English simply lack. The usual description is Italian spoken with a Slavic accent. The vocabulary underneath remains overwhelmingly Latin.

Romanian is closest to Italian, at an estimated 77% lexical similarity, then French at 75%, Portuguese at 72% and Spanish at 71%. So if you already speak a Romance language, a surprising amount of written Romanian is guessable. Speaking is the harder jump: Romanian kept noun cases and sticks the definite article onto the end of the noun, so “the wolf” is lupul, not el lobo.

Yes, and it is Romanian’s signature feature: it is the only major Romance language that kept noun cases. You will see “five cases” repeated across the web, but that overstates the work. In nouns, nominative and accusative are identical, and genitive and dative are identical, so there are really only three distinct forms, plus a vocative that is quietly fading out of everyday urban speech.

Almost entirely. Romanian spelling is essentially phonemic with no silent letters, so once you know the alphabet you can read nearly any word aloud correctly on first sight. The alphabet runs to 31 letters: the 26 Latin ones plus ă, â, î, ș and ț. K, Q, W and Y turn up only in loanwords such as kilogram, quasar, watt and yoga. That is a real advantage over French or English.

That depends on your reason, but the speaker base is larger than most people assume: roughly 24 million native speakers, and official status in Romania, Moldova and the European Union. Moldovan is the same language under a political label, and Moldova’s parliament formally adopted the name “Romanian” in 2023. For UK-based learners it is unusually practical: the 2021 census counted over 530,000 Romanian-born residents in England alone.

Yes, and the free tier gets you a long way. Vocabulary trainers, podcasts and Romanian radio and television are all freely available online, and public-domain course materials exist for Romanian. Free resources handle vocabulary and listening well. They are weakest on speaking practice and on correcting your case endings, which is where most self-taught learners stall. Our Romanian vocabulary trainer is free and needs no signup.