Generate Romanian Reading Passages for Your Students

Level-matched texts with tap-to-translate vocabulary and line-by-line support.

Teaching Romanian requires reading texts that match your students' actual skill level without overwhelming them. With Stichos, you can provide accessible reading materials that support independent learning. Use our live reader to explore beginner texts or prepare custom materials for your lessons.

Un apartament nou în București

Martin cumpără mobilă nouă.

Martin buys new furniture.

El este într-un apartament în București.

He is in an apartment in Bucharest.

Apartamentul este mare și alb.

The apartment is large and white.

Camerele sunt goale.

The rooms are empty.

Martin așteaptă un prieten.

Martin is waiting for a friend.

Prietenul lui se numește Mihai.

His friend's name is Mihai.

Mihai aduce o canapea mare.

Mihai brings a big sofa.

Canapeaua este grea și albastră.

The sofa is heavy and blue.

Bărbații pun canapeaua în sufragerie.

The men put the sofa in the living room.

Mihai aduce și mâncare tradițională.

Mihai also brings traditional food.

El are o pungă mică.

He has a small bag.

Punga are covrigi calzi.

The bag has warm pretzels.

Mirosul este foarte bun.

The smell is very good.

Un covrig cade pe jos.

A pretzel falls on the floor.

Martin râde și ia covrigul.

Martin laughs and takes the pretzel.

Bărbații mănâncă covrigi calzi.

The men eat warm pretzels.

Mâncarea este gustoasă.

The food is tasty.

Mihai bea apă rece.

Mihai drinks cold water.

Martin ia piesele din lemn.

Martin takes the wooden parts.

Acum ei montează masa.

Now they assemble the table.

Masa este nouă și frumoasă.

The table is new and beautiful.

Ei pun masa în sufragerie.

They put the table in the living room.

Masa stă lângă canapea.

The table sits next to the sofa.

Camera arată bine.

The room looks good.

Martin este foarte bucuros.

Martin is very happy.

Noul apartament este gata.

The new apartment is ready.

Key characteristics of the Romanian language

Speakers

About 22 million people speak Romanian as a first language (2020), chiefly in Romania and Moldova.1

Did you know?

Romanian is a Romance language that attaches its definite article to the end of the noun (casă "house", casa "the house"), a feature it shares with neighbouring Balkan languages rather than with other Romance languages.1

The main challenge

Noun endings that are unusual for a Romance language: a genitive-dative case, and a neuter gender whose nouns behave as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural.1

CEFR exams

Where students struggle

  • The vowels ă and â/î, which most learners' first languages lack.1

Teaching notes

  • Teach să + verb as a fixed frame early, as in vreau să merg (I want to go): Romanian uses this subjunctive where most Romance languages use an infinitive.1

Sources

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language

About the Romanian language

Language familyIndo-European → Romance → Eastern Romance1
SpeakersAbout 22 million native speakers (2020), chiefly in Romania and Moldova.1
Primary scriptLatin script: the 31-letter Romanian alphabet, with five modified letters (ă, â, î, ș, ț). The Romanian Academy requires the comma-below ș and ț, not the cedilla forms.2
Word order & typologyUsually subject–verb–object, with subject pronouns usually left out. Romanian keeps case forms (nominative–accusative, genitive–dative and a vocative) and a neuter gender, and, unlike the Western Romance languages, attaches the definite article to the end of the noun (pom → pomul).3
Official statusOfficial in Romania and Moldova and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union (since 2007); also official in Serbia’s province of Vojvodina.1,4
  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_alphabet
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_grammar
  4. https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/languages_en

Romanian reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR)

Stichos levelApproximate framework equivalentReader profile
A0Pre-A1Early Beginner
A1CEFR A1Beginner
A2CEFR A2Elementary
B1CEFR B1Intermediate
B2CEFR B2Upper Intermediate

The framework column uses CEFR levels only. Romanian proficiency exams, such as RoExam from Babeș-Bolyai University and the Romanian Cultural Institute, are set at the same levels, A1 to C2, but Stichos levels describe reading difficulty and are not exam preparation.

Reference corpora

Corpus work on contemporary Romanian centres on the Romanian Academy’s reference corpus.1

  • CoRoLa: The Corpus computațional de referință pentru limba română contemporană (CoRoLa), begun in 2014 as a Romanian Academy priority programme by RACAI in Bucharest and the Institute for Theoretical Informatics in Iași, holds more than a billion words of Romanian written since 1989, plus about 300 hours of recorded speech, all lemmatized and morphologically annotated.1
  • Everyday register: Stichos writes standard, modern Romanian with dictionary-standard (DEX) vocabulary and, at A0 and A1, keeps to everyday verbs: vreau rather than doresc, mă uit la rather than privesc, zice or spune rather than rostește.
  1. https://corola.racai.ro/

Readability design principles

Readability tools for Romanian are still being built: in 2024 the LEMI authors reported that no existing platform integrated a research-based readability formula for the language.1

  • LEMI: Chitez, Dascălu and colleagues (LREC-COLING 2024) derive and calibrate a Romanian readability formula from a corpus of school reading texts for pupils aged 7 to 11, using the ReaderBench text-analysis framework for its first validation steps.1
  • Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits. A0 sentences have at most five words and no conjunctions; connectives then open in a fixed order, from și at A1 to sau, dar and că at A2 and dacă, iar and deși at B1.
  1. https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1429/

Script & grammar scaffolding

  • Tenses: A0 uses only the present (prezent). A1 adds a near future with am să (am să fac). The compound past (perfect compus) and the future with o să or va arrive at A2, the imperfect at B1 and the pluperfect (mai-mult-ca-perfect) at B2; the literary simple past (perfect simplu) appears only from C1.
  • The subjunctive: Romanian often uses să with a subjunctive where other Romance languages use an infinitive (Vreau să scriu, “I want to write”). Apart from the future forms with am să (A1) and o să (A2), Stichos opens the present subjunctive at B1, together with the present conditional and dacă clauses.
  • Gerund and passive: The gerund (gerunziu) and the passive voice (diateza pasivă) are held back until B2.
  • Address and pronouns: Peers and friends use tu; strangers and formal settings get dumneavoastră. Unstressed object pronouns sit directly before a finite verb, as in o văd.

Related academic & framework resources

Frequently Asked Questions

What is included in the free preview on this page?
You can try a live-generated A0 or A1 story directly on this page, featuring tap-to-translate words and line-by-line translations. If you join the Reading List, you will also receive 3 sample stories as a downloadable PDF without needing to create an account.
Which levels will be available when Educator Studio launches?
At launch, Educator Studio will cover every level from A0 through B2. You will be able to generate level-matched texts across all of these levels for your teaching needs.
How do I share reading passages with my students?
At launch, you will be able to share any generated story by sending a link directly to your students. There will be no limit on how many share links you can create.
Do my students need to register to read a shared story?
No, your students can open and read shared stories in their browser without making an account. They will be invited to create a free account if they wish to save their stories and vocabulary, but it is never required.
Can students hear the Romanian text spoken aloud?
At launch, students reading a shared story can tap any word to hear it pronounced using a standard computer voice. With the optional Premium Audio add-on, teachers can provide natural-sounding voices for word pronunciation, full story narration with distinct voices for dialogue characters, and MP3 audio exports.
How accurate are the AI-generated Romanian texts?
Stories are written by AI and automatically checked against the vocabulary and grammar rules of the chosen level. Because the automated check is not a human editor, an occasional slip can get through, so you should review each text before sharing it with your class.
Can I adapt the story content to focus on specific grammar, like Romanian subjunctive frames?
At launch, you can turn specific tenses on or off, paste a custom word list for the story to use, choose any topic, and manually edit any sentence or translation before sending the passage to your students. This makes it easy to focus on key structures like the să + verb frame early in their learning.

Learning Romanian yourself? Try the learner reader →

Free Language Reading Samples for Tutors · Stichos