First Steps in Romanian

I am such a sucker for new language offerings on Duolingo, my favorite online language learning program.  Romanian is the latest language that has caught my attention and set me daydreaming about a different country and a new culture.

A quick Internet search located the country of Romania in Eastern Europe.

24 million people speak Romanian as a native language and four million more as a second language. Romanian is the only Romance language currently spoken in an area where Slavic languages dominate. The European Union lists Romanian as one of its official languages.  And if this were not enough enticement, the infamous Dracula is a product of Romanian folk legends. (I may not be reading these!)

Dracula's Castle?

First, a word to naysayers who are not quite as addicted to language study as I am.  Why Romanian, they may ask?  The appeal for me was that Romanian is one of the principal Romance languages (along with Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish). I practice four of them (minus Catalan) on a daily basis on Duolingo.  The lure of learning a new language for which I have somewhat of a head start was too much to resist.

In the introductory Romanian lessons, I looked for familiar vocabulary words.  Hmm.  Not as familiar as I would have preferred!  The word for juice, suc reminded me of suco  in Portuguese; the word for bread, păine, looked like pain in French; cafea (coffee) was close to English; femeie (woman) looks like female in English.  Many of the other words, bărbat (man), băiat (boy) and copil (child) will require more attention. 

I am making baby steps in Romanian at present, perhaps because the beta version currently available on Duolingo is only a web version.  The other languages I study can be done on the fly with the Duolingo app on a mobile device.. 

But I have started using a comparison/contrast technique to determine how to say "a, "an" and "the" in Romanian. You may be smiling at the elementary nature of this grammar point.  But the ability to use indefinite and definite articles is a common starting point in language learning.  (After all, is the meaning of "an apple" the same as "the apple"?)

Here are some patterns I discovered:

un copil - a child
copilul - the child

o cafea - a coffee
cafeaua - the coffee

un măr - an apple
marul - the apple

un băiat - a boy
băiatul - the boy

o femeie - a woman
femeia - the woman


So what can I hypothesize from these few examples?

-The translations for a, an in Romanian are un and o, perhaps un for masculine nouns and o for feminine nouns?

-The definite article (the) in Romanian appears in a surprising position - attached to the end of the noun as a suffix.

- The definite article suffix takes several forms:  -ul; -a; and -ua.

- Sometimes the letter "a" carries a diacritic and is written ă.  Does the diacritic indicate a change in pronunciation or some other feature?

I have more questions than answers at this point. 

Are Romanian nouns classified by gender, and if so, are the genders masculine and feminine as in other Romance languages? What is the determining factor in the form of the definite article?  I have discovered three up to now. What's with the "ă"?  (It took me a while to locate the symbol to type. Now I want to know more about it.) 

The Romanian language has an intrinsic appeal for me.  Who knows why?  Some languages do, and others don't.  I'm looking forward to making many more discoveries in Romanian as my fifth Romance language.