Learning Romanian

I've had the most success with Spaced Repetition Systems when I create the cards myself, and the cards are all material that I am reviewing, not something I have never seen before.

I think this makes a large difference for foreign language learning. I never focus on learning words. I always learn words in the context of a sentence. I choose my sentences by taking them from things people say, books I read, videos I watch, etc...This is especially helpful because when I review the sentences in the SRS sometime later, I will read the sentence and almost always recall the broader context in which I learned it (the page in the book, the scene in the movie). This works really well for learning how to use words (and idioms especially) in their proper context.

Mnemosyne is my SRS of choice: http://mnemosyne-proj.org/. Very customizable, but a lot easier to get started with than Anki. It's a local app, so no Internet needed, like Memrise. The one downside is no good mobile app version.

Very much worth reading is this post by gwern:

http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition

(I've been reading that and the tons of references from there pretty much all day since writing that post).

For me, best approach to learn a new language is to read a book in parallel in both languages. I tend to use novels that were translated in both languages, this way I won't get into trouble with the way a particular writer uses the language. Imagine trying to learn English by reading Faulkner or Mark Twain.

For e.g, say that you are Dutch and want to learn Romanian, you buy a novel by Dostoyevsky (since this was written in Russian you can be sure it was translated in both languages) that you read before (this way you won't pay much attention to the story) and read it in parallel Dutch/Romanian.

I don't speak a single word of Romanian, but it seems similar to italian and a little french. I can read a newspaper and 'get' the meaning of the articles, for instance. It's an amusing language, not slavic at all like its neighbouring countries. Good luck learning Romanian! Side note: the Danish have a similar word to 'gezellig': 'hygge'.

You need to make sure what you're learning is actually what you think you're learning; The blog post says "sobolanul" means "rat" but it actually means "the rat", "sobolan" is "rat".

I use Memrise for the spaced repetition part. In the courses that I'm taking, the mnemonic techniques (associating pictures or whatever to new words) are just flat out horrible.