Romanian and Romansh resources and lessons
Welcome to my website. Learning obscure languages is something of a hobby for me; I don't know why or how it started or why I love doing it so much, but I do. In particular, the Romansh language of Switzerland and the Romanian language of Romania and Moldova have intrigued me over time. The problem however, comes when you start having to trawl the Internet for an age to find any remotely useful resources, be it a dictionary, vocab and grammar lessons or courses in general. But my aim with this little website is to condense my knowledge and resources onto one small site for your use and mine, I suspect!
Romanian or Limba română is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people in Romania and Moldova and is reputatably the closest living language to Classical Latin, especially in terms of grammar. Romanian is the only Romance language to have retained a system of declension and the only Romance language to have a neuter gender. However years of isolation amongst Slavophonic countries has lead to extensive loanwords influencing the lexicon, with estimates indicating that about 30% of vocabulary in the spoken language is Slavic nowadays, although generally speaking these loanwords will have a Latinate synonym.
Romansh or Rumantsch is also member of the Romance languages, but it hails from the valleys of Graubunden in southern Switzerland and its fate in recent years has been somewhat grim. The language is spoken by just 0.9% of the Swiss population and has been in steady decline over many years. But I'll let it do the talking, a great language that really does not deserve the state it has gotten into. Hop onto www.memrise.com/topic/romansh/wordlists/ for some basic drills I made recently to get you started!