Romanian - seems to be a few errors

Community-Created Courses Other European Languages
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Hi, been doing the Romanian 101 course and ran into a few problems, some confirmed during a recent trip to Moldova and I’ve run them through Google Translate and a couple of online Romanian–>English translators to check.

“Pa” is bye, not goodbye. “La revedere” is goodbye and used most often.
“Bine” is well (as in “I am well”), not good. “Bun” is good.
Apparently, you should use the form “Va rog” for “please” when meeting people you don’t know or you wish to show respect to (teachers, doctors etc). “Te rog” is too familiar.

You use “Pot” for “I can” and “can I?”, when neither is right. “Eu pot” or “Pot sa”, apparently.

I need" is wrong
"I go" is wrong…

Given that I’m only 60-odd words in, this is pretty poor and I don’t have confidence that what I am learning is correct. I was thinking of going Pro, but if you can’t get the basics right, I’m not wasting money on the advanced stuff.

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looking at your profile, you speak in fact about a user-made course. You should try to post the link to the course, contact the creator or ask a moderator to do it (btw, even stupid wikipedia can tell you romanian is not a slavic language)

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No idea what the difference between courses is, it’s marketed and put forward by Memrise, presumably they should have some responsibility for its content.

I’m no language expert and don’t know what you would classify Romanian as, I just wanted to learn a few basics, but this app is giving me wrong information.

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You realize how many courses on the site there are right? The majority of which are user-created, by people like you and me.
We need a link to the course to know on which you’re talking about. If the creator is on the forums, we tag them. If not, we contact a staff member to help.

Edit: looks like you’re talking about this one:


Creator isn’t active.

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The “app” isn’t giving you wrong information, an app is only a collection of algorithms. The wrong information you are getting is from the course you have chosen, which - sadly - contains some errors.

There are many fine courses hosted by the memrise app - some of which are made by the memrise team and others made by “regular” people. What memrise offers is a FREE platform for people to post language courses, what they don’t offer is an editing service of every single course that is available via this platform. That would be a mammoth task and the tiny memrise team doesn’t have the resources to check every single community-created course for correct content.

Many people who find courses that contain errors then offer to become course contributors - which means you can access and change the database for the course in question - and then help themselves and anyone else who finds the course.

I did this for a four-part Swedish course (8,000+ Most Common Swedish Words) and it has been the best thing ever for my Swedish. Because - like you - I was checking the words on various online dictionaries or just looking for them on google.se, I was able to really learn a lot about Swedish and how its vocabulary works.

If you are interested in improving this course, then contact @Lien and she can find out if the original course creator is OK with you taking on this job.

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Why would I want to do that? I want to learn Romanian, not error correct someone else’s work.

It would appear Memrise is not what I thought. I thought it was a professional company producing language courses hence, you could pay to use it. I will look elsewhere as this isn’t ffor me.

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When memrise first came out, one of its main driving ideas was the idea of community and of people helping each other to learn.

So many of us “veterans” see it as part of the community aspect of memrise to offer our services to help others.

Maybe a company like “Babbel” would be more your cup of tea, seeing as the idea of helping others is so repellent to you.

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Va rog means please/go ahead/help yourself… the republic of moldavia has weird expressions and archaic ones, that even I, as a romanian cannot understand…

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I’ve moved this thread to Other European Languages, because Romanian is not a Slavic Language.

Romanian 101 has a course forum here:

I’ve made the following changes:

  • “pa = goodbye” is now “pa = bye, goodbye (short)”.
  • “bine = good” is now “bine = well, good”. You’re correct that bine is the adverb “well” and bun/bună is the adjective “good.” However, I prefer not to confuse people who are accustomed to seeing “good”.
  • “te rog = please” is now “te rog = please (informal)”

I am leaving the following entries as they are:

  • “pot = I can” and “pot? = can I”. Neither of these is incorrect. Like Spanish, when the subject of the sentence is clear from the conjugation of the verb or the context of the sentence, it is not required. If you’re asking a question, such as “can I go?” or “should she eat?” you put sa or să between the conjugated verb and the unconjugated verb.
  • “îmi trebuie = I need”. Although Google translates îmi trebuie as “I must have,” WordReference translates trebui as “must, should, need.” Also, there are several sentences in later lessons that use this word.
  • “mă duc = I go”. I see nothing wrong with this entry. I could change the English clue to “I go, I am going,” if that makes you feel better…
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if u need help or have any questions about romanian, let me know

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