Bună seara! I’m from Lithuania and I decided to learn your beautiful language, maybe I was Romanian in my past life since I feel weird patriotism for your anthem and march songs 😄

I nailed the pronunciation and I don’t know that much of grammar and words yet. I’ve done the Duolingo course for nearly a year and it’s comparable to my five years of German classes at school, haha! Now I question the effectiveness of the third language teaching at school, most students aren’t motivated to learn it…

After listening to [AMI – Dulce Simfonie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQhqb6V6NNg), I can definitely feel the Â/Î being pronounced as Ă. But as I consulted multiple Romanian people they’ve told me that the only right pronunciation of it is Ы, as it is in Russian. The Moldovan O-Zone band seems to be pronouncing the letters as U, like in “salut”.

How many dialects of those letters really are? Are they necessarily wrong?

20 comments

  1. I listened to the song and don’t really see (or should I say hear? 🙂 ) what you mean. The singer pronounces everything the way it’s supposed to (and Â/Î are different sounds than Ă). Maybe you mistook the song’s vocal riff for a word?

  6. Ă, U and Â/Î are definitely different sounds and O-Zone does not pronounce them the same.

    Your Romanian friends are right, Â/Î is pronounced the same as Ы is pronounced in Russian.

  7. Ă is English Schwa /ə/. Î and  are stronger, stemming from the throat, variants of Ă. ‘Sunt’ is an exception where the u is pronounced î, but this is otherwise rarely the case. U is like the U in German ‘gut’.

  8. Ă/ă – sounds like in “spid**e**r / fight**e**r” in any english version. You’ll learn it fast. Â/â – I can’t find anything relatable, but in russian – and I can’t speak russian. Anyway, as you are familiar with russian language, it will be – really – quite easy.

  10. Thanks y’all for providing help on pronunciation of Â/Î, however I’ve already learned how to say it 🙂

    I’m just interested if alternate pronunciations are valid as well

  11. It’s hard to find an English equivalent to Â/Î, but a way to envision it is when you say ‘Hmmm’, the brief vowel connecting h to m is pretty much like Hîmm.

    The jaw moves forward and you almost scrunch your nose, like a sound of disgust when saying â/î, so it sounds more like ‘ugh’; as opposed to ă, which is like trying to remember something like ‘Uhhhh..’

    Just Google translate some Romanian words like ‘înger’, ‘mâncare’, ‘plâns”, ‘îngust’ and have the voice say it loud and you’ll know what I mean.

  12. The word “sunt” is commonly pronounced as “sânt” as that’s how it was actually spelt a few decades back (“sînt” i think was the used form)

  13. Here are the pronunciations (there’s a button on the upper right side on the wikipedia pages to play the sound)

    – Â/Î – [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_unrounded_vowel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_unrounded_vowel), same as russian ы

    – Ă – [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_central_vowel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_central_vowel), like in the english word “**a**fraid” (see here: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/afraid#Pronunciation](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/afraid#Pronunciation))

  14. Congratulations!

    Okay, here’s the deal:

    Romanian is a phonetic language, you pronounce the sounds of each letter in the word.

    However you did catch on to something that is not a dialect, but a quirk and unacademically accepted “rule” of romanian:

    Eu (I , Me) is not read as E-U, but IO, IEU, or sometimes literally EU. However we still spell it as “Eu”

    This also applies to EL (him) EA (her) EI (them male) ELE (them fem)

    EL will be IEL
    EA will be IA
    EI will be IEI
    ELE will be IELE

    Sunt (I am, it is) is usually read as S-U-N-T, but sometimes as S-î-N-T or in Moldova and transylvania “Î-S” or just a hard pressed “S”

    Type:Eu sunt român
    Pronounciations:
    1. Io sînt român
    2. Io-s român (this is how I’d say it)
    3. Ieu sunt român
    4. Ieu îs român

    Another example is if you hear romanians say “Europe”

    It will either be EUROPA or IEUROPA, I have no idea why we do this.

    The numbers beyond 10 will be tricky, you will be taught to spell 25 for example as “douăzeci și cinci”, but romanians shorten it to “Douășcinci”
    Or 11 as “unsprezece” but romanians will say “unșpe”

    All numbers beyond 10 have an academic spelling and pronounciation we completely ignore and a “real” pronounciation that we do not spell.

    Worry not! You can pronounce everything in the scholary way and everyone will understand you perfectly. You will catch on to these quirks and adopt them to your liking if you feel you can talk faster by using them.

    The only thing you will never hear is people pronouncing “EU” as “EU”, it will be “IO” in 90% of the cases

  15. ы is pronounced more like îi in Romanian than î/â alone, it is the first part of that sound in Russian only. Definitely not ă. Unlike Russian, Romanian is very strict on vowels even when unstressed. Ă is pronounced more like an unstressed а or о in Russian, like in обед.

  16. Ă is pronounced like the Americam indefinite article “a” like when you say “a tree, a fruit, a block”. Or lke “uh” in Uhmm, Duh, Uhh etc in English. We spell Duh as Dăă, with 2 or 3 ă because the sound is longer lol.

    Â/î is the Russian / Chinese sound like in Kosygin, Smyslov etc which America writes as Y.

    But in some regions people might sometimes substitute the first to the second. It is not the official way of speaking tho.

  18. litera ă din română poate fi similară cu pronunția sunetului o din яблоко iablăcă (pentru ca nici in rusă nu se aude iabloko) înseamnă măr pentru cei care nu știu rusă

    î/â e ca sunetul ы din был bâl tradus în română înseamnă a fost. Diferența e ortografică. [Î]n limba rom[â]nă se scrie cu [î] la [î]nceputul și sf[â]rșitul cuv[â]ntului. Se scrie cu [â] în interiorul cuv[â]ntului așa cum vezi și din explicația mea simplistă.

    Vrei să deprinzi româna corect!

    îți recomand emisiunile Teleenciclopedia (erau în România ceva extraordinar înainte de Discovery channel sau de alte canale de documentare) Găsești câteva și pe youtube.

    [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUEvK2-UaOk&list=PL69JPlXzBQRHYpNSzWO0n01LjKBDDL204](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUEvK2-UaOk&list=PL69JPlXzBQRHYpNSzWO0n01LjKBDDL204)

  19. > How many dialects of those letters really are? Are they necessarily wrong?

    I have heard many foreigners use the ă/u sound instead of î, so while it’s not necessarily correct, I’d say you would be understood 99% of the time.

  20. Very flattering.

    ​

    Ă sounds like the A in “an” in english. Example: (Ă)n example.

    ​

    Â/Î is more unique, i can’t give an example in english of how it sounds but phonetically wise it’s more similar to “u” in “tr(u)e” than with a/i. It can pass undistinguished in certain words such as “Uncerc” rather than “Încerc”

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