Hi,

For your Romanian family history, since this is not related to the pronunciation lesson, I have replied in our dedicated area for such questions at:
(OLD URL removed, not available anymore)
I'll write you an email with the details of your username and password to be able to reply over there if you so wish.

In any case all the best in finding your family!

You are right, there are limited exceptions when "e" can be read as [ie] (IPA format /je/).
The exceptions are personal pronouns: eu, el, ea and the forms of the "a fi" (to be) verb: este, e, eram, erai, era, erati,erau.
Please find part of the above pronunciations at:
Romanian verb "a fi" (to be) conjugations
if you would need the other ones please let us know.

I'have added a new section in this lesson after the pronunciation of "E" explaining the two ways of pronouncing "E" in Romanian.

Thank you Sylvia, It is very useful to know it. I hope one day we'll be able to translate this website in German to allow Germans to learn easy and fast Romanian as well.

Hi Fergus,Thank you for your kind words. We are striving to add more content and to improve the website. So hopefully this website will be more and more useful for anybody that would like to study Romanian.Admin

Hi,
Thank you for your appreciations. Please check the next lessons on pronunciation as well. There you will find many exercises as well. I'm planning to add in this lessons on the Romanian vowels exercises as well. I'm a bit unhappy that I couldn't find the time so far, but I'll do my best to do it.

I was also considering adding exercises where you could speak and your voice would get recorded and then appreciated whether it's accurate pronunciation or not. It's quite a task, I hope that one day I'll add it though. I would be curious to know if, generally speaking the visitors of this website would be interested in such a feature, as the effort to set it up is considerable.

Thank you one more time and if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer and help!

Hi Iulian,

Thank you for your comment.

The following past forms (imperfect) of the Romanian verb "a fi" (to be):eram, erai, era, erați, erau are to be pronounced as /je'ram/ /je'raj/ /je'ra/ /je.rat͡sʲ/ /je.raw/
There are two sources for this rule: First is the Romanian academy that clearly specifies it:"in pronumele personale și în formele verbului a fi se scrie e dar se pronunță [ie]: eu, el, ei, ele, ești, este, e, eram, erai, era, erați, erau"
And then the most interesting part it in a footnote on the above quoted statement, thus still by the Romanian Academy:
"Rostirea hipercorectă [e] in loc de [ie] în aceste forme - practicată în special în învățământ pentru a fixa la elevi deprinderea de scriere este greșită"
The hyper-correct pronunciation [e] instead of [ie] in these forms - used mainly in the education sector to anchor the habit of writting [with e] is wrong.

Thus not only that the Romanian Academy states that it should be pronounced as /je/ they state that the pronunciation /e/ is wrong.
You can find the above quotations including the note in the book called "Dicționarul ortografic, ortopeic și morfologic al limbii române" published by the Romanian Academy, the linguistic institute Iorgu Iordan - Al Rosetti"

The pronunciation of "e" in the middle of a Romanian word depends on the consonants or vowels before or after it. In your example in the word "prieten" it is because of the vowel "i" that occurs before "e" that you will hear "ie". The correct pronunciation using the phonetic alphabet is /pri'e.ten/ thus the "e" is pronounced as /e/ and not as /je/.
You can check this lesson as well:
The pronunciation of romanian vowels "ie"

I assume that by "standard Romanian" you mean spoken Romanian or street language. In spoken Romanian you will hear many variations of the above, sometimes correct sometimes not, I can't really generalize and state whether there is a prevailing way in spoken language.

Happy to help