I can't spell words out in Romanian

I had great difficulties spelling out my email to a real estate agent. The thing with Romanian is that it's a very phonetic language (unlike English), so when it comes to reading you just do it without bothering about pronunciation because the way a word is spelled is the pronunciation. Take the word "audible" in English, for example. In Romanian it reads as"Ow-dee-bleh" (with the 'ow' part like the ow from 'how'.)
In English you have to form a sound with the 'au', then with the 'di' (which can easily be a 'di' as in Lady Di), then finally the 'e' at the end is silent and phonetically useless; a big no-no with vowels in Romanian.

You would think this makes Romanian ABCs easy, but they're really not...there are no rules for spelling things out apparently and I took full advantage by saying some of the letters phonetically (A is 'Ah') and others in English -like the 'eL' and 'eM'. Honestly it was annoying and I'm not convinced she got my email down properly.

At the same time, I did learn that 'Necomandat' in real-estate terms means Open-concept. What an achievement.

Comments

AnonymousApril 05, 2011
Awesome man... did not know you moved!! good for you!! what are you doing out there? oh.. is your BB still active? Alex L
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