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Step 30 – Speak Romanian even with Romanians who speak English and listen to them tell you over and over and over again that you don’t speak their language very well.
Meanwhile they are free to butcher English of course and argue with you that “am fost la mall” is “I went AT the mall” and just be smug as hell about how superior their knowledge of English grammar is to your own.
Step 31 – Continue speaking Romanian to anyone and everyone, including an old man who literally has no teeth (sweet guy though, I loved him), gypsies, beggars, country bumpkins (who say ah-CHEE for aici), people from Oltenia (who have their own special past tense for verbs), people in Bucharest, people from the Banat and of course, Moldovans – all of whom have their own special accents, slang, pronunciations and even totally different words for ordinary things.
Step 32 – Go to Bucharest and meet one of the actors who was in La Bloc and tell him how the show helped you learn Romanian and what a shitty show it was and he laughs and agrees 1000% and sits down and drinks a beer with you and tells you many awesome anecdotes.
His character’s name on the show, btw, was “The American” and you find this ironic and amusing NOW but extremely frustrating and bizarre back when you were watching it.
Step 33 – Start getting stopped on the street and asked for directions (especially to the CEC). Grin with supreme delight as not only do you know where the thing is but you can explain how to get there in Romanian! Yay.
Since Romanians are genetically the WORST direction givers on the planet, I consider myself a hero for my valiant service in this regard.
Step 34 – Start learning Russian and then a whole HOST of the weird parts of Romanian grammar and syntax start making total sense to you.
Step 35 – Begin helping your Hungarian friends and exchange students from other countries with Romanian.
Step 36 – Go to Bucharest and have someone think you are actually a native from Transylvania. Yay!!! You win! You finally speak Romanian so good people think you’re FROM here.
Step 37 – Tell everyone you know about how you officially speak Romanian now and have been crowned the new King of Romania and have absolutely nobody be impressed whatsoever LOL. But hey, I’m happy and that’s what matters.
See? There you go. Wasn’t so hard. Only took about 10 years :D