Completely cleared and language learning

This week of school wore me out. I don't even want to think about the amount of sleep Ive gotten since school let out yesterday afternoon. But just a little while ago I realized that it has been a week since I sent in my dental paperwork and I still had not received an email or anything saying that they received it. So I hopped on over to the Peace Corps toolkit and apparently I am finally fully cleared for everything. I was kinda upset that I didn't get an email from Peace Corps about the toolkit change but when I checked my email it turned out they had sent me one...at 5 o'clock this morning. Why is it always at ridiculous hours? Oh well, doesn't matter.

I spent the next hour learning more Romanian from some lessons they provide on the toolkit site. It's an interesting language and is going to take some getting used to, but I was happy that it was a lot easier to pronounce the sentences than the last time I tried. Felt a lot more comfortable and I didn't get as tongue-tied. Luckily since I have tried to learn a lot of languages I was familiar to the feeling of it being really awkward and that it gets better as you become more familiar with the language.

For instance here is a lovely sentence... Puteţi să mă ajutaţi, vă rog. Translated as, "could you help me, please."

It's kinda weird cause the language is very similar to Italian when pronounced, but it also has a lot in common with French in the way that some words blend together, a liaison as my French teacher would say.

But as far as the derivation of the words it is especially confusing. Take the colors for instance:

Red is roşu, similar to the Spanish rojo, the French rogue, and the Italian rosso.

However, white is alb, which is similar to Latin, albus, but not similar to the other three Romance languages at all. Spanish, blanco; French, blanc; Italian, bianco.

Another example is yellow, or galben, which is not like Spanish, amarillo, French, jaune, or Latin, flavi, but instead is very similar to Italian, giallo, or even German, gelb.

So basically what I am saying is that while Romanian is very closely related to many languages Ive studied, it also seems to be annoying confusing with which words it borrows from which language.

BTW...here is an awesome band from Moldova that gives you a good idea of what the language sounds like without the boringness of having to listen to a conversation you don't understand... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZo93VD74Nw