My Romanian coworkers were impressed when I started learning Romanian. I’d say “bună” (hello), complete with the ă, and they’d be shocked by even this basic effort.

What confused me, though: several of them insisted that Romanian was “hard”. I wasn’t sure at first how vehemently to disagree. I think of English as being a hard language to learn, partly because its mixed ancestry makes it fail to be consistent in its behavior. Take through, tough, dough, cough, plough, and thought, for example. Six different ways to say “ough” already.

It could be that I just have an advantage here. Romanian is, no surprise from the name, a romance language, as are French and Spanish. I studied French for 5 years, Spanish for about a year, and I have a smattering of German as well.

After about a year of Romanian, I recently switched to Haitian Creole (Kreyòl Ayisyen). Kreyòl is especially fun for someone with a background in French, because so many of the words are similar in pronunciation but different in spelling. Fwomaj, for example (fromage in French and cheese in English).

And then the other day, out of curiosity, I tried a bit of Polish. I am about 50% Polish in ancestry, after all. My grandfather would mutter a few numbers in Polish now and then when playing cards.

Jestem kobietą, says Duolingo. Uh oh. We’re on familiar territory with jestem (I am), but we’re already in a whole new place with kobietą (a woman). It didn’t get easier from there.

And that’s still a language with a familiar-ish writing system. I did dip my toe into Hindi on Duolingo for like… two days. In that time, we’re nowhere near using words, we’re just getting the sounds of a few characters down. I gave up because it was just too challenging for me to see the differences between symbols on my tiny phone screen.

Considering all that, then, Romanian might have been one of the easiest possible choices for me. It uses a mostly familiar alphabet. The pronunciation system is one-and-done: learn the full set and you’ve got pretty much the entire language (no “six ways to say -ough”). A lot of the grammatical concepts and words are familiar to me from either French or Spanish.

I have gone back to Kreyòl for now. Here’s one thing that’s blowing my mind about Kreyòl at the moment:

mwen manje – I eat
ou manje – you eat
li manje – he/she eats
nou manje – we eat
yo manje – they eat

Uhh. I was just starting to get used to Romanian’s ability (like Spanish) to drop pronouns and know who we’re talking about by how the verb is conjugated. Completely the opposite here!

I love seeing stuff like that.