Romanian uses the same Latin alphabet you already know, with five extra letters carrying small marks. The good news is that the spelling is consistent. Learn how each letter sounds once, and you can read words you've never seen. That's a real advantage over English, where the same letter can sound completely different from one word to the next. In Romanian, what you see is, with very few exceptions, what you say. Let's walk the alphabet and spend the most time on the handful of letters that trip up English speakers.
What's familiar right away
Most consonants behave the way you'd expect: b, d, f, l, m, n, p, r, t, v, and z all sound close to English. One small difference is the r, which is lightly rolled or tapped rather than the soft English r, though you'll be understood even if yours comes out softer at first. The vowels a, e, i, o, and u are pure, clean sounds, closer to Spanish or Italian than to English. They stay short and don't glide, so resist the English habit of stretching them. You can hear those clean vowels in everyday words like these:
The letters that change sound
A few consonants shift depending on the vowel that follows, the same pattern Italian uses. The letter c sounds like "k" before a, o, and u, but like "ch" before e and i. The same goes for g.
In the first word, c is a hard "k." In the second, the c before i softens to "ch." Once you notice the rule, it stops feeling random.
The five special letters
This is where most of your attention should go. Three are vowels and two are consonants:
- ă is a short, neutral "uh," like the a in "sofa."
- â and î are the same sound, a tight central vowel with no close English match. Think of the i in "roses" said with a closed mouth.
- ș is simply "sh."
- ț is "ts," like the end of "cats."
You'll meet all five constantly, even in your first lessons:
Notice the ț in the first and third words doing its "ts" job, and the ă giving that soft "uh" at the end of "bună."
How to practice the alphabet
Don't drill letters in isolation. Letters click when you hear them inside real words. Pick a short greeting, listen to a native speaker say it, then repeat it out loud until your version matches.
The fastest way to learn the sounds is to copy a voice, not to read a chart. Your ear teaches your mouth.
Say each line a few times. Within a week the special letters stop looking foreign and start feeling automatic.
A note on q, w, and y
You might wonder where letters like q, w, and y fit. They're part of the alphabet but show up almost only in borrowed words and foreign names, so you can mostly set them aside as a beginner. Romanian built its own vocabulary from Latin roots that didn't need them. When you do meet them, they behave roughly as they do in the source language, so a word imported from English keeps its English-style sounds. This is one less thing to worry about while you focus on the sounds that actually carry Romanian.
If you'd like a native voice for every letter and word, the Learn Romanian app has audio for the whole course and works offline, so you can practice the alphabet on a commute or a flight. The first 30 days are free.