• ABOUT ME

I am Nico, a passionate Romanian teacher and enthusiastic author of several instructional materials for studying Romanian as a foreign language.  

I grew up in Constanța, Romania's largest sea port - a city with a rich history and a unique potpourri charm of cultures and languages. As a child, I remember being very curious about the different languages I heard spoken around and always comparing them with Romanian, my native tongue. This genuine fascination with languages is what determined me to attend a high school with philology profile, and later on to pursue a degree in philology.

I graduated from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca with a MA in Germanistics and two additional modules: one in pedagogy and another one in RLS (Româna ca limbă străină = Romanian as a foreign language).

Taking up an RLS course has turned out to be a perspective shift for me: it introduced me to a whole new world, that of teaching Romanian to non-native speakers, and, at the same time, it laid the foundation for my future career as a Romanian teacher.

During my MA study, I volunteered to teach free extracurricular RLS classes at Babeș-Bolyai University. This ensured that I obtained a valuable insight into the language problems that foreign speakers of Romanian are confronted with. Furthermore, interacting with international students has helped me broaden my understanding of languages and cultures all together.

I obtained a scholarship to study at Leipzig University in Germany and during this entire time period, I collaborated with the RLS lectureship at Babeș-Bolyai University in designing a RLS textbook. Working on this project, made me more aware of the issues that arise when teaching Romanian as a foreign language and I was able to learn lots of important things myself.

After finishing my studies as Valedictorian of my class, I moved to Leipzig. While volunteering for FraGes (Center for Women and Gender Studies of Leipzig University) and preparing to enroll into a PhD in Germanistics, I started to feel that this was not the right step to take, as my passion for RLS was growing every day more and started to play a key role in my life. So, I decided to follow my passion and teach Romanian instead.

When realizing how scarce the resources for learning and teaching RLS were at the time, I took it upon myself to create an online project, that was meant to help Romanian learners worldwide and make learning Romanian more easily accessible for everyone. And so was Learn Romanian with Nico born.

Ever since starting the project in 2013, I was able to gain invaluable experience as an RLS teacher by working with students from all around the globe, not only online, but also traditionally at the VHS (Adult Education Center) in Germany.

Throughout the years, my project has offered me the opportunity to meet passionate students, as well as fellow colleagues at various universities and language schools worldwide, with whom I keep in touch to this day and constantly exchange ideas.

 

• ABOUT LEARN ROMANIAN WITH NICO

Learn Romanian with Nico started in 2013 as an interactive online project, open to Romanian language enthusiasts from all around the world. We are a small and native publisher of Romanian language learning materials, which have been specifically designed for, tested with and proven to be successful with English speakers.

While combining systematic language practice with fun, our materials are an effective complement to any classroom curriculum of the Romanian language. In addition, we complement our learning material with a successful online language learning platform, with thousands of subscribers worldwide. Our creative and entertaining content related to the Romanian language and culture is consistently applauded by our students.