Language Overview: Romanian

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Buna, ce faceti, and welcome back to the channel. Today I'm back with another language review, this time about Romanian. Now, as far as the dialect situation goes, when I was studying Romanian, I tried to keep it to Wallachian, since that's spoken in Bucharest, but who knows how good I was at keeping it that way, because I think you'll know who I turned to for listening practice. With that out of the way, let's go. So, to start, like normal, here's the history of the language. Romanian, or Romana, is an Eastern Romance language in the Indo-European language family. The Roman Empire first broke into what's now Romania right around the turn of the 2nd century AD, conquering it in 106 AD after many decades right across the Danube. The prior and continuing inhabitants of the land are known as the Dacians, and they were most likely Indo-Europeans themselves from a different branch that no longer exists.

[00:00:42]They mixed with the Romans and a couple other tribes to form the first basis of the Romanian people, and relevant to us, they were speaking a dialect of Vulgar Latin. But then, around the middle of the 1st millennium, Slavic tribes moved in and through the area on their way south, introducing a massive amount of Slavic influence into Romanian that would continue to this day. As such, the language of the late 1st is given a new name, Common Romanian. This was an unattested language that evolved into all of the Eastern Romance languages, Romanian and the minority languages around it, all of which are called something Romanian, including Romanian itself, which can be called Daco-Romanian. So, after that, a bit of a dark age happened, where we know the languages were evolving, but they weren't written yet, so the state from about 1000 to 1500 is known as pre-literary Romanian. What we do know is that, in addition to Slavic influence from Bulgaria, a lot of Hungarian was borrowed in this time as well, since Hungary controlled a good portion of modern Romania. After that is Old Romanian, which was first attested right around 1500 and used the Cyrillic alphabet. This period saw a lot of Turkish influence from the Ottoman Empire. Modern Romanian is considered to have started in 1780 with the publication of a specific Romanian grammar book, as well as the mixed use of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets before officially switching to only Latin in 1881, which may have been due to a renewed interest in Romanian's Latin roots, and especially in French.

[00:01:55]Today, Romanian is the official language of Romania and Moldova. Yes, their constitution officially calls the language Romanian as of 2023, an official language in the Serbian autonomous province of Vojvodina, and an official language in the largely unrecognized breakaway state of Transnistria, but under the name Moldavian. It's also a recognized minority language in the whole country of Serbia, as well as Hungary and Ukraine. Romanian has about 22 million native speakers with about 4 million L2 speakers, adding up to about 26 million total speakers. Now, let's get into the language itself and talk about the phonology. Phonemically, Romanian has seven vowels and 22 consonants, totaling 29 phonemes. We'll start with the consonants, and this shouldn't be too difficult as none of the consonants are cross-linguistically rare, and there's no gemination, either. However, there is palatalization that can happen to any consonant if it's at the end of the word, and there used to be an unstressed e after it. Examples are lup, ban, and oc. And if you're wondering why I didn't say that the palatalized consonants are phonemic, that's because the palatalization is applied equally enough across all of the consonants that it's easier to just call it a supersegmental feature. You could also just see it as a swallowed e, because if a suffix is added to the end of the word, then the palatalization disappears and the e comes back. So, like oc is both I and eyes, but the eyes is ochi. So, now I can tell you all about allophones. There are two of them, and they're both on h.

[00:03:09]It becomes ch when it's either at the end of a word or in vowel-consonant position, like in duh or odihni. It also becomes sh when it's before e, like in Cehia, although this extends to palatalized h, as well, like in ceh.

[00:03:21]Yeah, there aren't many good examples of these. And that's all for the consonants, so let's move on to vowels.

[00:03:25]They're also fairly simple. Romanian vowels have no length distinction, and there's no reduction, either. However, there is a rare phoneme among them, the close central unrounded vowel i. It should also be mentioned that the schwa, uh, is phonemic. Romanian does make extensive use of diphthongs, but they're all just simple combinations of two or sometimes more vowels. The unusual part, though, is that Romanian has two opening diphthongs that start with a mid vowel, rather than a close one, ea and oa, like in seada and noapte. By rule, if you see one of these two diphthongs, it's almost always stressed. And finally, speaking of stress, Romanian doesn't really have one universal set of stress rules, but instead, there's one set for nouns and adjectives and another set for verbs.

[00:04:03]So, we'll explore those as we talk about the grammar. So, now it's time to see how Romanian writing works. Romanian uses its own version of the Latin alphabet with 27 letters, those being eight vowels and 19 consonants. You may also find k, q, w, and y in loanwords.

[00:04:18]To start, I'll just point out the diacritics. Romanian uses three diacritics and none of them are basic.

[00:04:23]Good on you, Romanian. First, there's accentul circumflex, which can go on both a and e, and either way, it indicates the i vowel like in vis and înghețată. Speaking of which, the other vowel diacritic is the breve or căciulă, which goes over a to make it pronounced ă, which is also found in pisică, pară, and măr. It's everywhere. The final diacritic, by contrast, is for consonants, and it's the strangest of them all. Romanian puts a comma or virgulă under s and ț to make them palatalized ș and ț respectively, like in șoim and Buștenița. Speaking of palatalization, remember back when I said that palatalization exists at the ends of words in the form of an underlying e that doesn't get pronounced. Well, in writing, that e is still written, so you'll know when to palatalize. For example, cloud is nor, and it pluralizes to nori. Still one syllable, but the r is palatalized. But then, the vocative plural of that word is norilor. Since another suffix was added, the e is fully pronounced again.

[00:05:14]And this concept can be paired with the diacritical comma. Wall is perete, and pluralized, it's pereți. So, this is a good time to also mention the changes that happen to c and g. As is typical for Romance languages, they change when before a and e, including silent e, but note that this doesn't include a. C is ch before a or e like in cer, but c elsewhere. While g is j before a and e like in fugar, but g elsewhere. In either case, you cancel the softening by adding a hash between the consonant and the vowel like in rechin and gata.

[00:05:43]However, I feel the need to clarify that unlike most other Romance languages, the letter J when soft is not pronounced the same as the letter J. This is j, that's z. And that's just about all the complication there is to Romanian orthography. The diphthongs are just represented by the vowel characters you'd expect. Unfortunately, stress isn't represented writing, but at least we still have the grammar to help us with that, which we'll get to. Be patient. And finally, there's capitalization for sentences, names of specific people and places, and holidays. So, with that, now it's time for the grammar, starting as always with the sentence structure. Romanian's default word order is SVO or subject-verb-object. To give a basic example sentence, we have Albina bea lapte dintr-o ceasca. This means the bee drinks milk from a cup. Word for word, it's subject with article, verb, direct object, prepositional phrase, SVO. But just like in other Romance languages, if the object closest to the verb is a pronoun and the verb isn't imperative or a participle, the pronoun will instead go before the verb. So, if we just wanted to say the bee drinks it, that'd be Albina bea. Also, questions move the verb before the subject, becoming VSO.

[00:06:44]So, a full sentence as a question would be Bea Albina lapte dintr-o ceasca?

[00:06:48]Although, just changing the intonation in a normal SVO sentence also works. So, about other rules of Romanian sentence structure. Adjectives almost always go after the noun, and this is a stronger rule than in other Romance languages. It applies to more short, common adjectives. Adjectives may still go before the noun for emphasis, though.

[00:07:03]However, all numbers, cardinal and ordinal, go before the noun, whereas both supplemental maybe possessive nouns and possessive pronouns all go after the noun. The language uses prepositions, those that go before the noun phrase.

[00:07:15]And finally, Romanian is pro-drop, so you don't have to include subject pronouns unless absolutely necessary.

[00:07:20]So, now it's time for the nouns.

[00:07:21]Romanian nouns are inflected for two numbers, singular and plural, and divided into three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, or at least that's the official story. Yeah, in languages with three-gender systems like this, you'd expect all three genders to have their own independent inflection systems, but in Romanian, its so-called neuter gender is actually made of nouns that behave masculine when singular, but feminine when plural. Therefore, neuter isn't the best name for them. They probably do better with something like heterogeneous or ambigeneric. But, since that's the term people are used to, I'll just keep referring to that category as neuter in this video. If you're wondering how this whole situation developed, I go in-depth about it in this video about Romance grammatical evolution. Speaking of that, there are some distinctively neuter things about the neuter nouns, like the fact that they're overwhelmingly inanimate, as opposed to the masculine nouns they split from, which are generally people and animals, though not always. To be clear, feminine nouns can be either. So, how do you tell the difference between the genders? To start, feminine nouns generally end with a, like gîscă, ceapă, and because I need redemption from the Romance Languages video, făină.

[00:08:20]Meanwhile, masculine nouns, which includes the neuter singular nouns, mostly end with u or a consonant, like masculine leu and stârc, and neuter ediţiu and oraş. However, nouns that end with e can basically be anything, so whereas câine and peşte are masculine and lapte is neuter, sabat, lăsat, carte, and vreme are all feminine. So, now let's talk about pluralization. The initial rule is just that masculine nouns add the suffix e, which will just be palatalization until another suffix is added, more on that in the next section, like antă anţi and vultur - vulturi. All nouns ending with e, regardless of gender, change that suffix to i, like masculine fluture - fluturi and feminine vulpe - vulpi. Other feminine nouns have the plural suffix e, like with casă - case and raţă - raţe.

[00:09:02]While most neuter nouns also add the suffix e, since, you know, they're feminine in the plural, like inel - inele and fruct - fructe. Unfortunately, Romanian has both a lot of predictable variation and many exceptions. For one, the e suffix causes palatalization to consonants before it, so we have urs - urşi and minte - minţi. Feminine nouns may also be subject to this, like gîscă - gîşte. Similarly, any masculine nouns that end with el or u after a vowel change that whole letter to i, such as with gard - gai. However, there's also the fact that many feminine nouns you'd expect to pluralize with e actually use e, like bicicletă - biciclete and aripa to aripi. But in addition, especially with feminine nouns like this, they often do a sort of umlaut-esque vowel change of an internal a to either uh or e, like strada to strazi and vada to veri, along with the masculine example of sharpe to sherpi. But the s suffix also does this sometimes, like in pana to pene. On a related note, the internal opening diphthongs of ea and la often disappear or reappear in plural forms, like how mlape pluralizes to nopti and chiapa to chepe, but also in the other direction, camion becomes camioane. And I haven't even mentioned yet that there are two entire other suffixes that could pluralize nouns. One of them is le, which typically goes on nouns that end with vowels you wouldn't normally find there, like zi to zile and stea to stele. And the other one is us, which mostly goes on neuter nouns and a lot of them, like turn to turnuri, vin to vinuri, and cer to ceruri. And then there's some other random irregular plurals, like ou to oua and cap to capete. So, yeah, that was a lot to go through for pluralization, but the good news is that the remaining case system is rather simple and extremely depleted.

[00:10:37]Well, unless you're scared of cases, then keep panicking. But anyway, remaining nouns actually have just three cases: nominative-accusative, genitive-dative, and vocative. Yes, two of those cases are themselves composites of other cases. So, how does that even work? Well, the nominative-accusative case, which is also the default case that nouns are shown in, is used as the subject of the sentence, nominative, the direct object, accusative, and after any prepositions that govern that case, which used to be a smaller group, but it has now expanded to literally most of the prepositions, including all of the common ones. And yes, this is often what depletion of the case system looks like in a language. Then, the genitive-dative case is used for both possession, genitive, provided you're not just using the preposition de, and the indirect object, dative, along with being governed by a few rarer prepositions, most of which can technically be called nouns. On nouns themselves, there's actually rarely a suffix change for this. Most of the case declensions are shown on the definite article, which we'll talk about in the next section.

[00:11:28]The only time that nouns themselves inflect for the genitive-dative is on feminine singular nouns, which basically just switch their plural form like casa becoming case, and serbatoare becoming serbatori. Then there's the vocative case, which is used to directly address someone or something. However, I won't actually discuss its declensions here because in Romanian grammar, it's easier to see the vocative as always being definite by default. So, once again, that'll be in the articles. So, to finish the nouns, those that end with the vowel are generally stressed on the penultimate syllable with the antepenultimate syllable also happening frequently, while the ones that end with the consonant move that pattern one closer to the end. Realistically though, my personal strategy for finding Romanian stress, at least on native vocabulary, is where's that word stressed in Italian, which forms a nice chain of stress recognition starting with Spanish. So, without further ado, let's see those articles. Romanian has both definite and indefinite articles, but they don't behave the same. The indefinite articles are words before the noun as you'd expect, but the definite articles are suffixes on the noun.

[00:12:23]Here's a chart of the definite articles.

[00:12:25]As seen here, masculine and neuter singular nominative nouns take ul as the definite article like strict to strictul, and orash to orashul. Unless it ends with a, in which case le is the suffix like sharpe to sharpele. The feminine takes a, but the important thing to know about that is that if the noun itself ends with a, the a simply replaces it like gisca becoming gisca.

[00:12:43]This is why reduction is no longer an allophone in Romanian. Without changing the stress, the final vowel changing from a to a makes it definite. For other feminine nouns, the a just goes after the whole word like carte to carta. I should also mention here that certain nouns add y as the suffix such as any nouns ending with ya like how stea becomes steaua. There's also zi to ziua.

[00:13:02]So, as for the plural nominative definite articles, masculine nouns take an extra e on the end like vultur which becomes definite as vulturi. Notice how both e's are now pronounced. Feminine and neuter nouns, because they're together now, take the conceptually easier suffix le like giste to gistele, and turnuri to turnurile. And yes, this includes if the plural suffix is already le. zile becomes zilele. By the way, notice how the stress never moves when the article suffix is added. So, now we can talk about the definite articles for the genitive dative case. As mentioned, these are even more distinct than the noun itself. For singular nouns, that masculine and neuter suffix is lui, like in stircului or șarpelui. For feminine nouns, first, remember that the genitive dative singular matches the nominative accusative plural. Then, add e to that word. So, we have, for example, gîștei, casei, and stelei. As for the genitive dative plural definite article, that's practically always lor on the plural form. So, there's sticilor, oracelor, gîștelor, zilelor, and turnurilor. And this brings us to the final case, the vocative, which is always definite by definition. This lor form also serves as pretty much everything's vocative plural. The vocative singular is a bit more complicated. For masculine and neuter nouns, the suffix is normally ule, like with stircule, orașule, and leule. But, if the noun itself ends with a, then the dictionary form is used for the vocative, as with șarpe and cîine.

[00:14:13]And for feminine nouns, most of them add the o suffix, potentially from the Slavic languages. This replaces the ă or a suffix, like with gîsco and caso, and goes after an a suffix, like in cartio and serpetuario. However, nouns ending with ea don't change, like sta. It just stays like that. And before moving on, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a particular grammatical rule that I may have screwed up in the Romance Grammar video. The definite articles are not used on nouns with a preposition before them. So, for example, the tower is turnul, but in the tower is just în turn. But, of course, there are two exceptions to this. First, the preposition cu, meaning with, does take the article. So, with the tower is cu turnul. The other exception is that the article still goes on the noun if a modifier, such as an adjective or possessive pronoun, is present. So, in my tower is în turnul meu. So, now it's finally time for the indefinite articles. They're just small words before the noun, as seen here. For nominative accusative singular nouns, the masculine article is un, and feminine is o. In the genitive dative case, they're unui and unei, respectively. And then, for all genders in the plural, the genitive dative actually stays on the same using unor, while in the nominative accusative, you just say niște, which means some. The vocative is irrelevant here. And finally, Romanian has a two-way distinction on demonstrative articles between this and that, both with full inflection tables. There's proximal acest and distal acel. They're both words that precede the noun most of the time. And now we're at the pronouns, so here's the big chart of them and we'll see what we notice. First, the chart itself is actually more detailed than that of the nouns. Instead of the combined cases, the nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative all have their own pronouns. Getting more into the details, one minor thing to know is that there are several pronouns starting with a, but don't get fooled, they actually start with ye, like yeo, yea, and ya. Now moving on to the accusative and dative pronouns, you'll notice that each of them has both a stressed and unstressed form. This is a pretty typical distinction. The unstressed forms are used before the verb as we talked about back in the syntax, while the stressed forms are used after prepositions. I also need to mention the reflexive pronoun se here, which is used when the subject does the verb to itself. Finally, there's the genitive forms, which are effectively just the possessive forms. They go after their nouns along with any prepositions that govern the genitive case, and for first and second person, they don't have just one form. They have the standard adjective layout of two by two, remembering how the neuter actually is.

[00:16:21]So for example, my is respectively meu, mea, mei, and mele. Also, the noun before it needs to be definite, so my cat is pisica mea. The so forms, by the way, are used optionally instead of lui or ye when the subject is also the possessor. And finally, Romanian has a set of formal pronouns all formed off the phrase dumneavoastră, which is a possessive phrase meaning your lordship.

[00:16:40]It also has the third person forms of dumnealui, dumneaei, and dumnealor. Now we're at the numbers, so here's one through 10. Although it should be mentioned that this is how they're counted. As you may remember from the indefinite articles, you're more likely to hear un or o than the counting number unu. Speaking of which, both one and two inflect for gender. For two, the forms are masculine doi and feminine două. In fact, counting one thing two things is the typical way that native Romanian speakers check the gender of a word. If it takes un and două, then it's neuter.

[00:17:08]The rest of the numbers above that don't inflect for gender until we get to any number ending with one or two. So like here's 11 through 19. This is actually a bit of an exception since 11, unsprezece, doesn't do gender, but 12 does, being either doisprezece or douăsprezece. By the way, all these numbers also have casual forms that are easier to say like unșpe, doișpe, douășpe, and treispe. So then here are the tens. They're pretty easy. They all just mean that number of tens. Then to make a two-digit number, you just say the tens number followed by și, the word for and, and the ones number. I should also mention that in Romanian, the presence of a number doesn't affect how the noun gets pluralized. And finally, here are the ordinal numbers. Except for first, întâi, you just add the suffix -lea to the end of the cardinal form. So now I'll talk about the adjectives.

[00:17:48]Romanian adjectives are fairly straightforward. Here's the chart of bun, for example. It inflects for two genders and two numbers with the same setup as the standard suffixes on nouns.

[00:17:56]Unless the adjective ends with -tor, then the feminine version is -tlati. If you're wondering about case inflections, the only one that applies to adjectives is the one where the feminine singular acts like it's plural, taking the -a suffix in the genitive dative case. I should also mention here that any adjective can be used as a noun, and when it is, it can take the definite article suffixes, including all their case inflections. But when the adjectives are actually used as adjectives beside nouns, it doesn't matter if the noun is definite or not, the adjective just uses these forms here. However, I also need to show the example adjective mare because adjectives that end with -a in the dictionary form don't inflect for gender, and they simply take the mostly silent -e suffix in the plural, plus the feminine singular genitive dative case.

[00:18:32]And that's really all there is to say about adjectives. And now we're at the verbs. To start, Romanian does have infinitive verbs, and they largely have one of five suffixes: -a, -ea, -e, -i, and -î. The infinitives are also commonly accompanied by the particle a in citations. However, there are two caveats here that you need to know about. First, Romanian is part of the Balkan Sprachbund, which means that infinitive verbs are almost never used on their own. Now, Romanian itself does have a few auxiliaries that go with the infinitive form, and we'll get to those, but for the place where you'd actually expect an infinitive verb, it's not there. We got to talk about this already in the Serbian video, a fellow Sprachbund member. A sentence like I want to sleep in Romanian is not vreau dormi, but instead is vreau să dorm, literally I want that I sleep. We'll talk more about să in the subjunctive later, but for the other infinitive caveat, remember the vowels they can end with? Well, those vowels do indicate some important information for verb conjugations, they're not actually the whole verb class system. Particularly for the present tense and imperative mood, many verbs may take an extra is or isc suffix, and you just got to learn these individually. So, with that, let's talk about conjugations. In order to cover all the bases, the example verbs will be suna, zbura, proteja, părea, crede, ieși, vorbi, coborî, and urî. But first, notice how of all these infinitive verbs, only the i-verb crede isn't stressed on the last syllable. That's right, Romanian verbs are stressed predictably based on their class and conjugation. So, if you want a really deep knowledge of those patterns, keep your ears open throughout this section.

[00:19:55]Anyway, we'll start with the present tense, so here's suna. On initial inspection, the chart is pretty basic, it's just three people and two numbers, like you'd expect in Europe. About the conjugations themselves, the first person singular doesn't have any suffix, while the second person singular makes that final consonant palatalized. A slight difference, but important. The third person singular and plural are identical, unfortunately, both ending with ă. And finally, the other two plural forms both have their suffix stressed rather than the root. This is a great example of the follow Spanish and Italian stress guideline. The bad news is that this is about as basic as a Romanian verb can get. Here's a verb that looks very similar on the surface, zbura. And what's up with the vowels?

[00:20:28]Yeah, especially with u, sometimes the vowel in the root can change for purely historical reasons. Technically, the u in the infinitive, as well as two of the plural conjugations here, is the odd one out. It resulted from a reduction of o in the past when unstressed. Also, the third person forms have a diphthong being zwoară, whereas I fly is just zbor. It's triggered by the ă suffix, and this is a consistent pattern that we'll see more of in the other example verbs. Like the next one, proteja. Here we have our first hidden additional suffix, because as you can see, all the present tense forms, except first and second plural, add is before any personal suffixes that may be there. It affects a-verbs, and that suffix is itself affected by the third person diphthongization, becoming protejează as opposed to protejez. But I need to make a quick stop at another verb umbla.

[00:21:09]Notice how the first person singular is umblu. This is just because saying umblu is awkward. So now getting into other verb classes, here's bada. First, notice how the root vowel a becomes a when it's stressed. But the main differences happen in the third person forms. The singular form is bate with a different suffix, while the plural form is bar. It no longer matches the third person singular. Now it matches the first person singular with its lack of suffix, and this is the norm for the verb classes other than a. So with that in mind, here's crede. This is effectively the same class as bada with all the same suffixes. But also notice how the second person singular is crez. This is simply what happens when a d is palatalized.

[00:21:42]The other palatalization changes are shown here, and they all happen on the second person singular along with some other situations. To see a weirder example of this, here's ieși. It's our first i verb, and as such, the stem of the infinitive itself is palatalized.

[00:21:54]Contrast it with I or they go out, which is just ies. This verb also provides a great reason to know the stress patterns. Check the spelling on the second person singular form. It's spelled exactly the same as the infinitive, but it's pronounced ieși, not ieși. Now we can address the other surprise present suffix. So here's vorbi. Similar to a on a verbs, many e verbs add this esc suffix in the present to the same four forms, and it's what gets conjugated for person. I talk and they talk are both vorbesc. You talk is vorbești, and he she talks is vorbește.

[00:22:22]So then we have our final verb class i, represented by coborî. This is a weird one as it kind of straddles the line between an a and e verb, but the main thing to know is that the third person forms behave like an a verb being coboară. But then you may also find the isc suffix on some of these. But when it happens to an e verb, it's instead usc as we see with urî. This one still behaves mostly like an e verb. So with that, I can explain the subjunctive. But don't worry, the Romanian subjunctive is very depleted compared to the other Romance languages. It only affects the present. The subjunctive in Romanian is still used in subordinate clauses when there's a doubt about the verb happening. However, due to the whole Balkan anti-infinitive thing, it gets used in a lot of places where other languages would use the infinitive. It also comes with its own conjunction să.

[00:23:01]We saw an example of this earlier with vedea să doarmă, and another one is, okay, you knew this was coming, vrea să plece dar nu mai e. So, does the verb ever change for this subjunctive? Yes, but only in the third person. It basically just reverses the personal suffix there. If the third person in the indicative present has a, then the subjunctive has e, and vice versa. So, for example, they need to fly is trebuie să zboare, and she needs to talk is trebuie să vorbească, which I think is a very cool sounding verb. Here are all the example verbs listed with their subjunctive forms. So, our next tense, or more accurately tense aspect, is the imperfect, which is the past tense specifically for verbs that were ongoing or habitual, you know, imperfective aspect. Thankfully, these conjugations are pretty easy. All verb classes use the same suffixes. Here's suna, zbura, proteja without the s, but a, crede which keeps the e suffix, ieși which also has the a even though it's an e verb, vorbi with no isc, coborî, and urî. And since there's a past tense with the imperfective aspect, that implies the existence of a preterite, the past tense that happened once or had a clear start and known as the simple perfect.

[00:24:01]These verbs are inflected differently based on the verb class. So, here's suna with stressed suffixes of i, aș, etc. Same applies to zbura and proteja. But then per a is in the next group. Its suffixes are ui, uș, and so on. That group includes crede, but notice how the d became z again here. Then ieși starts a new pattern for e verbs having the suffixes i, iș, etc. Vorbi, of course, does the same thing. Then for the i class, there's coborî doing exactly what you'd expect with the previous patterns, along with urî. But here's the thing about the imperfect and the simple perfect. Both of them are gradually being replaced in Romanian by the have perfect, but it's going at different speeds both between those conjugations and between regions, which is why I still included them. I'll explain the have perfect when I get to Romanian's large amount of compound tenses in a minute. But for now, there's also a single verb conjugation called the pluperfect, which indicates that the verb had happened before something else in the past. Making it actually isn't that hard since you just saw the preterite. You take the root, add the same vowel that was used in the preterite suffix, and then add another suffix with an S to make the personal conjugation. Here's suna, zbura, proteja, para, crede, ieși, vorbi, coborî, and urî. So, now for the final non-compound conjugation, we have the imperative, of course, for telling people what to do. The plural form is pretty easy. It always matches the second person plural present tense conjugation. Similarly, the singular imperative matches, listen carefully, the third person singular present tense conjugation in seven of our nine example verbs. For the other two, para, the ia verb, and ieși, the i verb without an extra suffix, it matches the second person singular. Before the singular, these conjugations are only for affirmative commands. If you're saying not to do something, then you actually just use the infinitive verb preceded by the negative particle nu, which, by the way, is the negative particle for all conjugations, not just imperative. So, don't talk singular is just nu vorbi.

[00:25:42]So, now, as previously advertised, we can get into all the other Romanian tenses or aspects or modes that are made with auxiliaries. First, of course, there's the compound perfect, which, as mentioned, is replacing the preterite and imperfect in various Romanian-speaking regions in different ways. You make it by first saying the appropriately conjugated form of avea, meaning have, followed by the masculine singular form of the action verb's passive participle, which is the adjective for a noun that the verb has been done to. So, how do you make the passive participle? It depends on the verb class. You basically take the root, add the same vowel that was added for the preterite, and then t. So, from our example verbs, we get the a verbs sunat, zburat, and protejat, the effectively e verbs părut and crezut, which still has the palatalization, the i verbs ieșit and vorbit, and the î verbs coborât and urât. There are three other compound conjugations, all of which use some conjugation of an auxiliary verb followed by the infinitive form of the action verb. First, there's the future tense, which uses this set of conjugations taken from the verb vrea, meaning want. But, surprisingly, this isn't the same set of conjugations used when you actually want to say want. That chart looks like this. On a similar note, there's the presumptive mood, which would basically translate to the English word might. It's formed from a completely different set of auxiliaries, also supposedly derived from vrea, but all starting with o. The final compound conjugation is the optative conditional mood. Yes, it represents both of those concepts. The optative mood is used to express desires, so like should, while the conditional mood represents verbs that would happen under certain conditions. Its auxiliaries are taken from other weird conjugations of avea, which we've already seen. I should call out ash being first person singular here because that's very strange. And speaking of common verbs with weird conjugations, there are a few of them that we should look at closer. Since we've already seen a fair amount of avea, I'll start with that and note how it's normal conjugations when it actually means have look like this. The third person in particular is a bit irregular, being ad in singular and au in plural. They both also have an interesting subjunctive form, aiba. The rest of the tenses are regular for an avea verb though. It's a similar story with vra, with the most interesting forms being vrau for I want and vor for they want. I'll also take a moment to shout out lua, meaning takes, since its present tense form straight up changed the l to e, becoming yau, yei, and so on. And finally, there's the verb we always expect to be irregular in some way, the copula fi. The present tense is completely suppleted, albeit with a normal Romance setup. The imperfect is also suppleted, while the rest of the tenses at least start with f. But for this one, the subjunctive forms also start with f, not relating in the slightest to the indicative present, and the passive participle is fost, while the gerund is fiind. Wait, what's that?

[00:28:03]Your Romanian has a gerund which describes nouns doing the action, although unlike in the Western Romance languages, Romanian doesn't have a progressive construction that uses it.

[00:28:11]You make the gerund by adding the suffix ind to the end of the root, except for e verbs, where you add ind. And finally, for the verbs, Romanian actually has a very easy way to form any verbal noun, noun referring to the action itself. You take the infinitive verb and add the suffix re, creating a feminine noun.

[00:28:25]Here are all our example verbs in this beautiful system. Now for the miscellaneous section, Romanian has multiple words for the conjunction that that we need to talk about. To start, we've already seen sa. It's the conjunction that indicates a subjunctive verb when it may or may not happen.

[00:28:38]Otherwise, the whole cloth conjunction is actually ca, like in I see that you ate an apple, vad ca am incatumar. As for the relativizing conjunction, when only a noun is being connected, that word is got it and if it's connecting to a direct object, it also needs be in front like in the apple that you ate looks fresh.

[00:28:56]However, got it also has inflections of its own. Granted, it's always got it if it's in the nominative accusative case, but for the genitive dative case, it could be got lui, got ei, and got lor.

[00:29:04]So for example, with the dative meaning, that's the elephant I gave the apple to is acesta este elefantul căruia i-am dat mărul. So finally, we got our example sentences to look at. The first one is This means the birds might put me under the bread. First, there's păsările, the plural form of pasăre, the feminine noun meaning bird with the feminine plural nominative and accusative definite article suffix le. Notice both how it gains a breve in the plural and how the e is pronounced since there's a suffix.

[00:29:30]Without it, the word would just be pasări. Then there's m with a hyphen.

[00:29:33]This is a shortening of the unstressed accusative pronoun mă, which is first person singular. This is just how it looks before a vowel, which we find in or. This is the third person plural aux verb for the presumptive mood, so might.

[00:29:44]Then there's pune, the a verb meaning put, but it's just infinitive here since or is doing all the inflection work. And finally, we have a prepositional phrase sub pâine, under the bread. Sub is the preposition meaning under and pâine is the feminine noun meaning bread. But where's the? Well, since it's a prepositional phrase, the noun can't take the definite article suffix. Sub pâine is ungrammatical. The other example sentences șopârlele se uită la rezultatul jocului. This means lizards look at the results of the game. First, we have șopârlele, which is the plural of șopârlă, the feminine noun meaning lizard. It's not definite, so we don't have to worry about that. Next, we see the verb se uită. Se is the reflexive pronoun, which always goes with this verb as it means look at, and the verb itself is uită. This is the third person plural present tense conjugation of uita, an a verb. Without the reflexive pronoun and preposition, it means forget. And finally, we have a prepositional phrase la rezultatul jocului. La means to and it's basically another part of the verb se uită, required for it to make sense. Then there's rezultat, the neuter noun meaning result, but it's after a preposition. Why does this noun have the definite article? This is one of the exceptions to the ban on the definite article in prepositional phrases. If the noun has a modifier, then it does get to keep the article. Here, it's followed by a genitive noun, jocului. Joc is another neuter noun meaning game, and its definite article is ului, used to represent the genitive dative case for masculine nouns, which is what this is, since it's neuter and singular.

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