G1.2 Questions in Romanian - Advanced level
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Questions in Romanian - Advanced level
In the previous lesson on interrogatives you learned how to ask basic questions in Romanian.
In this lesson we’ll explain how to ask more complex questions in Romanian with the help of:
- Interrogative pronouns: Cine (Who), Ce(What), Care(Which one)...
- Interrogative adjectives:Care carte (which book), Câtă cafea (how much coffee)...
- your feedback
Romanian Interrogative pronouns: Cine (Who), Ce(What), Care(Which one)...
The comprehensive examples below list all Romanian interrogative pronouns together with all the possible combinations of pronouns and prepositions.
When asking questions, the interrogative pronouns Cine? (Who?) Ce? (What?) Care(Which?) Cât/Câtă/Câți/Câte? (How much/How many?) are extremely useful!
The pronoun Cine? (Who?) refers to beings, and Ce? (What?) to things.
Care? (Which one?) involves the choice among different options.
Cât, câtă, câți, câte? (How much/How many?) refer to the quantity or number of objects.
Except for ce? (what?) which is invariable, the others change their form according to the case, and even to the number or gender, as shown in the following table:
We're referring below to Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive what is this?
Look at this sentence: "The boy gave a pen to the girl". "The boy" is the subject thus it falls under the Nominative case. The object given by the boy: "a pen" is in the Accusative case. To whom does the boy give the pen? "to the girl" which is in the Dative case.
The Genitive case expresses possession: The boy's pen. "The boy" is in the Genitive case.
| Pronouns Nominative case | Pronouns Accusative case | Pronouns Genitive case | Pronouns Dative case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cine este la ușă? (Who is at the door?) |
Cu cine ai venit? (Who have you come with?*) Pe cine suni ? (Who are you calling?*) Pentru cine ai cumpărat cadoul? (Who have you bought the gift for?*) La cine s-a uitat? (Who has he/she looked at?*) Despre cine vorbea el? (Who was he talking about?*) De cine s-a luat? (Who has he/she picked on?*) |
Al cui angajat sunteți? (Whose employee are you?) A cui este geanta aceasta? (Whose bag is this?) Ai cui sunt acești ochelari? (Whose glasses are these?) Ale cui sunt cheile acestea? (Whose keys are these?) |
Cui îi trimiți e-mailul? (Who are you sending the e-mail to?) Cui îi dăm premiul? (Who do we give the prize to?) |
| Start learning | Start learning | ||
| Ce se întâmplă? (What's going on?) |
Ce ai găsit? (What have you found?) | Cu ce scrii? (What are you writing with?) Pe ce își cheltuie românii banii? (What are Romanians spending their money on?) La ce te uiți? (What are you looking at?) De ce nu vrei să vii? (Why don’t you want to come?) Despre ce este vorba in film? (What is the film/movie about?) |
|
| Care [dintre sportive] a câștigat? (Which one [sportswomen] won? |
Pe care i-ai văzut? (Which ones have you seen?) Cu care a plecat? (Which one has he left with?) |
Al căruia este pixul? (Whose pen is it? you are literally saying To who does the pen belong?*) A căruia este harta? (Whose map is it? you are literally saying To who does the map belong?*) Al căreia este creionul? (Whose pencil is it? you are literally saying To who does the pencil belong?*) A căreia este floarea? (Whose flower is it? you are literally saying To who does the flower belong?*) Ai cărora sunt copiii? (Whose children are these? you are literally saying To who do the children belong?*) Ale cărora sunt scaunele? (Whose chairs are these? you are literally saying To who do the chairs belong?*) Al/a/ai/ale căruia/căreia/cărora are rarely used in spoken colloquial Romanian; The version with Al/a/ai/ale cui? is preferred: Al cui este pixul? There is no difference in meaning. |
Căruia (m.sg.) îi arătăm rezolvarea ? (To who do we show the solution?*) Căreia (f.sg.) (f.sg.) îi vom cumpăra biletul ? (To who are we going to buy the ticket?*) Cărora (m/f.pl.) să le acordăm atenție ? (To who should we pay attention?*) |
|
Cât (m.sg.) e ceasul? (What time is it? you are literally saying How much is the clock?) Câți (m.pl.) au reușit? (How many have succeeded?) Câte (f.pl.) au mâncat? (How many have eaten?) |
Cât (m.sg.) ai cumpărat? (How much have you bought?) Câtă (f.sg) au făcut? (How much have they made?) Câți(m.pl.) ai prins? (How many have you caught?) Câte(m.pl.) ați numărat ? (How many have you counted?) Pentru câți să cumpăr bilete la teatru? (For how many shall I buy the tickets to the theater ?) |
Copiii câtor (m./f.pl.) au intrat? (The children of how many have entered?) |
Câtor (m./f.pl.) le-ați mulțumit? (How many have you thanked?) |
| * in spoken language Who is used, however in written English Whom is preferred. | |||
Interrogative determiners: Which book, What part
First of all, what is an adjective? It's simple, an adjective qualifies a noun. For example "Which book have you bought?". "Which" is a pronominal adjective because it qualifies the noun "book".
Let's look at the many cases in which a Pronominal adjective can be.
As in English, Cât, Câtă (how much) is referring to uncountable nouns, whereas Câte, Câți (how many) is used for countable nouns.
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9 comments
'Whose' in Pronouns Genitive Case
Hi, thank you for the wonderful lessons. In the Pronouns Genitive Case section the use of 'Whose' is not used and does not translate like this. You wouldn't say'Whose colleague is the pen'. You would say either 'To whom does the pen belong' or 'To which colleague does the pen belong' or 'To whom does the pen belong' or 'Which colleague does the pen belong to'
Thank you Sarah for bringing
Thank you Sarah for bringing this to my attention. Would you say that only that sentence is wrong "Whose colleague is the pen?" or is it more generalized. I will redo my research and then would certainly correct the lesson. If you would have the time to cross-check my corrections it would be great.
'Whose' in Pronouns Genitive Case
As Sarah says, the 6 examples in the section "Interrogative adjectives: Which book, What part", in the first row and "Pronouns Genitive case" column have incorrect English translations. Google translate is wrong here!
The reason is that when you ask a question like:
"Whose pen is this?"
then the noun "pen" and the demonstrative pronoun "this" must refer to the same thing. You're really asking:
"Whose pen is this pen?"
So you can't have a question like:
"Whose colleague is this pen?"
because that would mean that the pen would have to be someone's colleague, which is obviously nonsense.
Instead you would have to rephrase it as something like:
"Whose colleague owns this pen?"
However, in practice no-one would ever ask such a question in English.
A better example would be a teacher addressing a group of parents and asking
"Whose child owns this pen?"
This is more likely to be said because the paren-child relationship is closer, and there's a sense of responsibility.
You can obviously change "child" to "son", "daughter", "children" to cover the different cases, for example (using Sarah's suggestion):
"Whose children do these coats belong to?"
or you could also say
"Whose children's coats are these?"
Thank you very much for
Thank you very much for taking the time to post your answer. I appreciate it.
You are right. I have just corrected the lesson for the section dealing with the Pronoun determiners in Romanian.
I have translated Al cărui coleg este pixul? by To which colleague does the pen belong?
I have chosen To which, because Al cărui has a link with choosing from a pool of something relatively known, in this case there is a pool of persons that the pen could belong to, from that pool we know that the owner must be a man due to the cărui which is specific for masculine soingular, however the person asking just does not know which one of the persons he is asking is the owner.
I was also checking whether I could still use the verb to be in the translation, since in Romanian este is a form of the verb a fi - to be.
However I guess To which colleagues is this pen? does not sound that natural in English, as belong to.In Romanian one could say Cui îi aparține pixul? but then Cui is in the Dative case.
These forms are similar with the French ones: auquel, auxquels, à laquelle, auxquelles, it's just that Romanian is even more complex as French has only variations based on the owners, masculine, feminine, singular plural, but Romanian has another level of spohistication where one needs can specify as well the type of noun/object (masculine, feminine, singular or plural) that the aswker is searching for the owner.
I have taken the time to use color coding, for the part that I corrected. Ideally I should re-write the whole lesson, to format it in another way that is more readable especially on the mobile phone. I find it more intuitive. I would appreciate your opinion if you find it useful as well.
A big thank you for your time and effort.
pronouns
Sorry about the delay in replying …
Yes, those translations all look good now, except that I did notice another typo on the page. A căruia este harta? should be Whose map is it? instead of Whose pixul is it? .
Colour coding in your examples like Cu ce scrii? (What are you writing with?) works very well I think to tie the equivalent Romanian and English words together. Definitely keep this.
I hadn't actually noticed the significance of the pink / blue to indicate feminine / masculine (plus green used elsewhere for the first/second person sing/pl). To be honest, the pink makes the text hard to read on a white background. For me personally, I think extending the use of colour to split by gender/person makes it overly complex - I would just use (f) and (m) after the word for the gender. But I do appreciate that you've used it a fair bit on your site, so this probably isn't something you wanted to hear!
As someone who's been learning Romanian a few months, the pronouns are the aspect of the language which I have found the most challenging. So I very much appreciate all the explanations on your site.
On a more general note, I'd like to suggest how I think you could improve the main grammar page at https://www.learnro.com/romanian-grammar
By way of background, I like to learn by listening to Romanian in other applications/sites. But I like to understand the structure of the sentence, so I'm forever referring back to web pages covering the grammar aspects. This is particularly the case for pronouns, and I use primarily the English wikipedia page for Romanian Grammar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_grammar), as it's easy to navigate. (But the pronouns section doesn't include the abbreviated forms such as "m-", which you include on your site).
So I think that it would be really useful to structure your main grammar page to address the needs of people coming back for reference like this. In your section "We have written several grammar lessons" think about how a reference for grammar should be structured (eg look at that wikipedia page), and make sure that all the grammar pages are directly linked from this contents table. For example, the page https://www.learnro.com/personal-pronouns-accusative-romanian isn't linked directly, so it's harder to find.
Even if you haven't completed sections you can have stubs ("reflexive pronouns - coming soon"), or even better for readers, link to somewhere else - eg for reflexive verbs and pronouns
That way, I think you could find people using your overall grammar page as their first point of reference for solving their grammar questions.
Finally, I've recently come across the Romanian structure as in your example Pe ce își cheltuie românii banii? (What are Romanians spending their money on?). Here "își" means "their", looks like a reflexive pronoun, but the sentence doesn't follow the standard reflexive verb pattern. I had to ask my son for an explanation, and he said it was something he had found confusing when he was learning Romanian, so I'm sure your readers would appreciate an explanation included somewhere appropriate.
Many thanks again!
Robbie
Thank you for your answer. I
Thank you for your answer.
I appreciate your feedback: on the colours, indeed I started using more and more the colours as I find it that it helps to faster learn by associating the color with the feminine, masculine.
For the anecdote I was researching whether this color coding blue/masculine, pink/feminine, and apparently this is not an world-wide rule :).
In the above lesson, there is a light pink, I spent some time searching for a better pink as I agree with you the contrast is not the best. Could you have a look at the page below in the tables section. I see you - Te văd - Romanian personal pronouns as direct objects | Romanian Lesson
How about the movie clips? are they useful? for exemple in the above mentioned lesson on the pronouns in accusative?
What do you think about what I call the feminine markers like on the page below, in the word "aceasta" where I have highlighted just the a with a dark pink. I find that it helps to easier spot that a and remember that this is the feminine demonstrative pronoun, as the difference between the masculine and feminine is this extra letter a.
Basic Romanian Words and Vital Phrases, Hi and How are you in Romanian | Romanian Lesson
I'll come back with a more detailed answer for the grammar section structure and the rest of your comments.
Happy to help!
colours etc
Yes, I find the darker pink a lot better. There's a much better contrast from the white background. Maybe you should explicitly mention the blue/pink colour scheme in a few key places. That way people will be aware of it and will find it more useful, particularly when you highlight a letter in pink to indicate a feminine form. Otherwise there's the danger that, like me, people will just miss the point of it.
Some of the videos I've found useful - eg on https://www.learnro.com/asking-directions I watched the first one several times to try to pick out the words.
Film clips I find less useful. I find people talk too fast and not clearly enough. Goodness, I usually switch on the subtitles when I'm watching American films!
Documentaries are a lot better because people speak more slowly and clearly. For example the one about the Arc de Triomphe on that page I found interesting, but I watched it on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSwg1Ie47ew because that way I could set the Romanian subtitles on. I'm not sure that everyone would be aware that youtube provides that feature though. You can make subtitles available for embedded youtube videos by using what's described at https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters, but again you might need to explain to people how to set them on. And I think they're auto-generated by youtube, so may not be perfect.
Thank you again for your
Thank you again for your prompt reply.
I'm happy that you like the dark pink contrast.
My spouse said the same thing to add a sort of legend that pink is feminine and blue is masculine. I'll see where to add it, as sometimes it is obvious e.g. https://www.learnro.com/be-have-conjugated-romanian where I'm starting with he blue, she pink. I'll add the legend or a few words about it on a few pages. It's a good suggestion.
For the Movie clips I find interesting your comment. It takes me quite some time to find those movie clips. On the Desktop version I added to the player the buttons for slowing down the clip at 0.5 and 0.75 of the speed. Maybe you haven't seen them. I'll double check whether I can add them on the mobile version as Google was not offering this option for the android playback some years ago, and I believe apple for their iOS neither. I'll double check it. I have an idea for quite some time to make an movie to add on the front page about how to use the site, including this slower videos and the feedback that one gets once they try the typing exercises, which I find very useful.
About the subtitles, I had another idea to add my own subtitles in both Romanian and English for the English pages, or French for the French pages... I have invested quite some time in that I already have a sort of a basic player that can add subtitles under the video, but the solution that I built was for my own checking it's not so good looking, I would need to make it look better. I did not go forward with this idea, as I thought that on a mobile phone the subtitles under the youtube clip would leave even less space for the actual clip. And since I find movie clips that are containing the keywords of the lesson, incidentally there will be other words in that mini-clip that might be too complicated, but eventually it would be good to still show them with Romanian subtitles and their English/French/Dutch translation I find, and then teach the student just the target words afterwards in the translation table and in the exercises.
Dear Robbie,
Dear Robbie,
I'm happy to have finalised the lesson on the Romanian Personal Pronouns in Accusative.
I believe it is a complete lesson with plenty of examples and explanations and especially easy to read and to easy to remember. It took me a lot of time to color code the English and Romanian pronouns so that it's easier to understand and make the link between the English pronoun and the Romanian one.
I have also added a very useful detail the word-by-word translation which I find quite important because for example we say in Romanian "pe ea" which is translated normally as "her" but if you take each word independently "pe ea" means "on she" not "on her". And in one go a student learning Romanian would understand very well that in that context is her, but in others it will be on she.
For the list of lessons, you have all the lessons up to date here, including the grammar lessons.
https://www.learnro.com/romanian-lessons
I'll double check the Grammar section to make it more intuitive. It's always some time and work to do even those small things but I will be happy to do it.
It took me some time I know however I have worked on other topics:
1) I reworked the lesson https://www.learnro.com/romanian-phrases-wants-likes-obligations , I added new videos, restructured it...
2) I added a new lesson: https://www.learnro.com/essential-needs-romanian
3) I drafted the comprehensive lesson on the usage of Mi-e in Romanian: https://www.learnro.com/mi-e-noun-romanian-guide - I've done some research of my own and drafted a complete and user friendly lesson with plenty of videos and rules. I enjoyed very much this process as Romanians do not need to think about the rules of their native language and sometimes those rules are not written in any Grammar book or any other website. And after some intense research I added rules that should guide the learner into easier understanding that particular construction.
All these lessons have exercises for students to test their knowledge and learn by checking their knowledge. The exercises have a built-in spaced repetition method that is automatically triggered.
And on top of that I drafted lessons in French, Dutch, German, Spanish and Brazilian Portugues, for example:
https://www.learnro.com/fr/expressions-besoins-essentiels-roumain
https://www.learnro.com/es/necesidades-esenciales-rumano
https://www.learnro.com/pt-br/necessidades-essenciais-romeno
https://www.learnro.com/nl/essentiele-behoeften-roemeens
https://www.learnro.com/de/grundbedurfnisse-rumanisch
I enjoyed the process and I enjoyed creating free quality content for everyone to learn Romanian.
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