🇷🇴 The best books for learning Romanian

Mirrors the US government's Foreign Service Institute and Peace Corps Romanian materials, which are public domain — nine courses totalling 18 ebooks and 77 audio files, all downloadable at no cost. The FSI approach is drill-heavy and thorough about grammar in a way modern apps are not, which suits learners who want systematic coverage. The recordings are decades old, so the audio quality and some vocabulary are dated. Free, though the site nudges you toward its paid tutoring.

Gönczöl and Deletant's course is the default recommendation for learners who want a real textbook: graded dialogues, systematic grammar, exercises with a key, and free downloadable audio from the publisher's site. Being on its fourth edition, it is better maintained than most Romanian materials in English. Best for self-studiers who work well from a book and want the grammar laid out in order. Costs money, and the pacing is brisk — expect to repeat units.

A clear, well-organised reference covering Romanian morphology and syntax — noun cases, the subjunctive, verb government, clitic pronoun order — with the explanations pitched at learners rather than linguists. It is the book to reach for when a rule you half-know keeps producing wrong sentences. Now in its second edition. Paid, and deliberately compact, so it explains rather than exhaustively catalogues; heavy users may eventually want something larger.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

A reading app built around finishing complete books: you pick a story at your level, tap a word or reveal a sentence's English translation when you get stuck, and it saves the words you looked up. There is one complete free book in every language and you can read a free chapter on the website without installing anything; the rest of the 1,100-book library is paid. The library is uneven: Ukrainian, Indonesian and French have dozens of stories, while Icelandic, Estonian and several Balkan languages have one or two. It is not the same as Storyglot's European Portuguese readers (storyglot.com), which are a separate project with the same name.