Learn Romanian free in your browser

Romanian is spoken by roughly 24-25 million people and holds a unique position on the European map: it is the only major Romance language in Eastern Europe, an official EU language, and the national language of both Romania and the Republic of Moldova. That places it in the same family as Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese — all descended from Latin — yet surrounded geographically by Slavic and other non-Romance neighbors, which gives Romanian a fascinatingly layered character. Romania itself is home to around 19 million speakers, Moldova to roughly 3 million more, and a sizable diaspora scattered across Italy, Spain, Germany, and the broader EU brings the total close to 25 million worldwide.

Romanian is written in the Latin alphabet, extended with five letters that mark sounds specific to the language: ă (a short, central vowel), â and î (two spellings of the same high central vowel), ș (a sh sound), and ț (a ts sound). Once those five are familiar, spelling is almost perfectly phonetic — every letter has one consistent sound, and words are read exactly as written, with stress falling predictably in most cases. Grammatically, Romanian kept features that other Romance languages shed centuries ago: it preserves a case system for nouns and pronouns (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and vocative), and it is the only widely spoken Romance language with a neuter gender, so a noun can behave as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. The definite article, unusually, is a suffix attached to the end of the noun rather than a separate word standing before it.

For learners who already know Spanish, Italian, French, or Portuguese, Romanian offers a remarkable shortcut. Core vocabulary shares clear Latin roots — words like carte (book), apă (water), timp (time), and bun (good) — and anyone with a Romance-language base will recognise a large proportion of Romanian words after even brief exposure. The Slavic-influenced layer adds some vocabulary that looks unfamiliar at first — words like a iubi (to love) or da (yes) — but it is a manageable addition to an otherwise recognisable Romance framework. Phonetic spelling means you gain reading fluency very quickly: there are no silent letters, no vowel shifts between spelling and pronunciation, and the five special letters each behave consistently. That combination — Romance roots plus phonetic writing — makes Romanian genuinely accessible to motivated learners, even those with no prior Romance-language background.

Langula's 80 Romanian lessons move through the language in the order that builds competence fastest: the five special letters and phonetic rules first, then present-tense verb forms and core vocabulary for everyday situations, then the past and conditional, and finally the subjunctive and the register shifts that separate B1 from B2. The five-box Leitner flashcards are well suited to Romanian because the language's trickiest elements — the case endings, the definite-article suffixes, and the neuter-gender noun class — all respond to exactly the spaced repetition the system provides. In-browser pronunciation practice scores your speech against native models using the browser's own speech recognition, giving you instant feedback on ș, ț, and the ă vowel, with no audio ever stored on any server. Everything runs free in any browser, on phone or desktop, with no download and no account required to begin.