Vocabulary

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Lesson Transcript

Bună tuturor! Sunt Raluca. Hi everybody! I’m Raluca.
Welcome to RomanianPod101.com’s Româna în 3 minute. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Romanian.
In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about your plans. In this lesson, we are going to deal with the verb ‘to be’ in Romanian, a fi.
We will also go over how to talk about your nationality.
When you meet a new person, they might ask you ¿De unde sunteți? which means "Where are you from?"
(slow) ¿De unde sunteți?
De means “from” and unde means “where”. So there is only one more thing, the verb. “Are you” is sunteți; just remember from the other lessons that the personal pronouns in Romanian can be omitted most of the time.
Sunteți is the present tense form of the verb “to be”, a fi.
Let’s try this together!
[slowly] ¿De unde sunteți?
¿De unde sunteți?
Answering this question is very easy! You just say Sunt, which means "I am", then your nationality. Be careful though, because in Romanian, we don’t write nationality names with a capital letter like in English!
For example: Sunt american.
[slowly] Sunt american.
“I am American.”
Just replace “American” with your own nationality.
"I am German" is Sunt german.
"I am Italian" is Sunt italian.
"I am Chinese" is Sunt chinez.
Keep in mind that this is how you refer to your nationality if you are male.
Feminine forms usually use că or oaică at the end of the nationality.
For example, if you are an American woman, you will say Sunt americancă.
Italian women say:
Sunt italiancă.
For Chinese women, it is:
Sunt chinezoaică,
and so on.
To return the question, you can simply say ¿Și tu? which is "And you?"
(slow) ¿Și tu?
Another way to say your nationality is by using the preposition din and the country name. I’ll show you how.
Sunt din America. Easy, right? Here you are saying ‘I’m from America’. How about another example: “I’m from Italy.”
Sunt din Italia.
Now it’s time for Raluca’s Insights.
Another useful expression with the verb a fi is when you answer the phone. To introduce your name, you can say Sunt, then your name. So when I pick up the phone I would say Sunt Raluca. It’s really simple! Now you try it! Imagine I’m calling you right now. How would you answer? (pause)
Good job, everyone!
In this lesson, you learned how to talk about nationalities.
Next time we’ll continue to study the verb a fi and see how to use it to talk about locations. By the way, do you know how to ask someone where they are in Romanian? I'll be waiting for you with the answer in the next Româna în 3 minute lesson.
Pe curând! See you soon!

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