Language Studies
You never realize just how scarce Romanian books are until you need one. I'm not sure why it is, but it's easier to find books about learning Armenian, Irish Gaelic, or Mongolian than it is to find a book about Romanian, despite the fact that Romanian has over 25 million speakers worldwide. Perhaps all the people who want to speak Romanian already do, and the ones who don't simplly get by with speaking Latin in a Count Dracula sort of accent (you'd actually be surprised how well that works). At any rate, between my natural curiosity about languages to begin with, previous plans to learn Italian (Romanian is a fair enough substitute), and the desire to converse with Oana's grandmother with more than smiles, nods, and awkward sign language, starting to learn Romanian was a virtual inevitability for me.
The means for doing so, however, didn't come quite so naturally as the desire. One book ordered off of amazon.ca proved to be so full of errors that even my very basic exposure to the language still told my gut that something was wrong.
"The Romanian word for here is aici (ahEECH), right?"
"Yes, why?"
"This book says it's aci (ahCHEE)."
"What?!? How do they spell that? Wow, that's several kinds of wrong."
So I ditched that book pretty quickly. It only cost $8, so I didn't feel too terrible about the fact that about 5% of the content appears to be utterly wrong.
On Sunday, when poking around the Chapters at Granville and Broadway, I was startled to see that they had not one, but two books on Romanian. I snatched them both up. The first was a Romanian-English dictionary, of not stellar but at least acceptable quality. It was the first Romanian dictionary I'd ever seen in the flesh, so to speak, so buying it was a no-brainer.
The second book was the Lonely Planet Eastern Europe Phrasebook, which includes not only Romanian, but also Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Macedonian, Polish, Serbian, Slovak, and Slovene. I wasn't really sure I needed a phrasebook, especially with Romanian being such a small percentage of it, until I took a better look at the cover.That's right: it's a girl with a backpack, a bottle of wine, and a phrasebook, attempting to make conversation with a vampire in the seat next to her. "I haven't even looked inside," I thought, "and this phrasebook already rules."
Each country in the book has its own personality. The Bulgarian section starts with a drawing of a lonely girl tying a sash around a moonlit tree. The Czech section is heralded by a drawing of a beret-clad man playing a violin at the doorway of an old-world style cafe. But, most importantly, the Romanian section's title page shows a dashing long-haired vampire striding his way up toward a gothic belltower under the shadows of bats and ominous clouds.
The other little drawings scattered throughout the text are almost as good, showing little vampire bats, gargoyles, and women with giant mugs of beer.
Disappointingly, the content itself, while good, is exclusively practical, without much to fit into the whole vampire theme, but at least it's enough to learn to say, "Imi pare rău. Eu nu mănînc usturoi. Unde est castelul?" (I'm sorry. I don't eat garlic. Where's the castle?)
