I have now got Teora’s englez-roman and roman-englez dictionaries by Andrei Bantaș. A friend sent me these from Romania.

I will certainly check out your recommendation for the Levitchi.

I’m finding Dex Online to be very useful. I go there for conjugations etc. I’ll have to check out dictionare.com.

Learning Romanian is hugely enjoyable for me as it is such a beautiful language.

Teora’s individual englez-roman and roman-englez dictionaries by Levitchi are superb. They have detailed explanations of many words, including expressions and colloquial uses.
The only problem is gender is not given in the englez-roman.

I would recommend dictionare.com as an online dictionary, I find it more useful and comprehensive than the Bantas NTC dictionary, which I first started out with. Not as much depth as Teora’s but some expressions and set phrases are given which is very handy.

(however, you may find the Bantas suffices, Teora is great for me as a Romanian degree student. But I swear the Manolache would seem primitive in comparison to Teora!)

Thank you for your comment! I’m glad you made it because it does make sense. Also, I think you are right, the Manolache dictionary has the plurals for nouns, so it looks like I am doing the Manolache dictionary a disservice. However the Manolache dictionary does not have any explanation of the terminology or use of symbols etc. in the opening pages. In fact there are hardly any opening pages. Also, as an aside, the print quality of the Manolache is really really terrible.

I’ve been planning a new blog entry about these dictionaries but haven’t got around to it yet. Your comment has been very useful.

I’ve realised something about the Bantaș dictionary which is quite a problem. The Bantaș dictionary must have originally been written for Romanians wishing to look up English because although it has English to Romanian as well as Romanian to English the actual entries for each word are addressed to a Romanian. There is a problem with gender in the Bantaș dictionary, in that if you look up an English word to find the Romanian equivalent then it does not give the gender for that Romanian equivalent. You have to then look for that Romanian word in the Romanian to English part to for this.

Anyway, I think a new blog entry from me is coming which will put Manolache above the Bantaș dictionary!

Creating plural forms of nouns in Romanian is extremely difficult. There are no rules, and you must memorize the pluralization of every noun in the language. The Manolache dictionary seems to address this much better than the Bantash (don’t have my Romanian accent keys on this computer, so I can’t write the name properly).

Does the Manolache dictionary say anything about its use of pronunciation accents in the opening pages?

Thank you for your comment. I think Romanian is a beautiful language.

English is, I suspect, a hard language to learn. Romanian is consistent in its pronunciation whereas English is not

However I will say that I find the Romanian “r” very difficult!

Patrick