Learn Romanian with short stories

Stories to read in Romanian, with the English beside each paragraph. They open in the browser, with no account needed, and each free one is also a free Romanian–English ebook for Kindle, Kobo or any e-reader: downloading needs a free account, no payment (which file to pick).

Open the Romanian–English library, where you can search the stories and filter them by level.

Want to hear it too? Romanian stories with audio are narrated, free, with a speed control.

By level:

• Beginner (A1–A2): Easy Romanian short stories for beginners, with English translation · 171 stories
• Intermediate (B1–B2): Intermediate Romanian short stories, side by side with English · 192 stories
• Advanced (C1–C2): Advanced Romanian stories, with the English alongside · 34 stories

Every story here carries its level on the Common European Framework, from A1 for beginners to C1 and beyond, so the library works as a set of Romanian graded readers, most of them free: start at the level where you understand most of a page, and move up when the English beside it is something you check only now and then.

Romanian is a Romance language, a cousin of Italian, Spanish and French, so a reader who knows one of them, or the Latin words English is full of, recognises much of a Romanian page. Spelling follows pronunciation closely: once you know how ă, â, î, ș and ț sound, you can read any page aloud.

What sets it apart is the grammar: nouns carry their definite article at the end (casă, a house; casa, the house), and a small case system changes those endings again. With the English beside each paragraph, you can see what each ending is doing long before you could explain it.

For Romanian speakers, a parallel text makes English books quicker going: read the English and look across to the Romanian when an idiom or a phrasal verb doesn’t land.

It works for families abroad too: one book, two languages on the same page, so children growing up with English can keep reading Romanian with their parents.

397 English stories in the library have Romanian alongside: Învață engleza cu povești scurte.

Long out of copyright and easy to find as EPUBs. Any of them makes a good first Romanian–English parallel text:

• Amintiri din copilărie, Ion Creangă
• Moara cu noroc, Ioan Slavici
• Ion, Liviu Rebreanu
• Poezii, Mihai Eminescu

Or use a book you already own: the method works best with something you actually want to read. See how to read a parallel text to get the most from it.