🇷🇴 The best courses for learning Romanian

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.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

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.

Produced by ARCA, the Romanian Forum for Refugees and Migrants, this covers the situations that matter when you have just moved: doctors and pharmacies, paperwork, markets, transport, with city walkthroughs filmed in Bucharest. It is the most grounded free Romanian resource for immigrants rather than hobbyists, and some playlists are also glossed in Russian. Free, with uploads continuing into August 2026. Production is functional rather than slick and the pedagogy is light.

A numbered video course that runs to well past lesson 60, moving from basics into workplace and abstract topics, which makes it one of the few free Romanian resources with a genuine beginning-to-intermediate arc. Nothing new has been posted since 2021, so this is a completed archive rather than a living channel — worth saying plainly, because the content itself has not dated. Free on YouTube. Video production is basic and there is no accompanying workbook.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

Romanian is a small enough market that RomanianPod101's back catalogue of recorded dialogues, breakdowns, vocabulary lists and PDF notes is genuinely hard to match — for lower-intermediate listening volume it has few rivals. New videos and lessons were still going out in August 2026. As with the rest of the Pod101 network, the sequencing between lessons is loose and the marketing is relentless, so it works better as a supplement than as your spine. The free tier is thin; the useful features need a subscription.

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.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

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.

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.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

A long-established school teaching Romanian as a foreign language across all levels, with group and individual options and preparation for the official language certification that residency and university admission can require. It is the obvious route if you need documented proof of level rather than just conversational ability. Paid, with prices depending on format. Being Bucharest-based, in-person timetables suit European hours better than other time zones.

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.