Take a course. Online courses are available, some for college credit. While many courses require a nominal fee, some free options are available.Try linguasnet.com/lessons/home_ro.html for one free option. Some Romanian software programs have free trials as well. Pimsleur--one of the most useful, according to the U.S. State Department--offers a free lesson from its program online at pimsleur.com/Learn-Romanian.
The courses work in a similar manner to traditional classroom approaches to language learning. You enroll for the class and attend it online. Some have set times for discussions and others do everything via email and message boards. It depends entirely on how the instructor sets up the course. Sometimes this can vary from one term to the next.
Online courses for college credit tend to be the most expensive way to learn Romanian online. Some online universities will allow you to take the class for no credit at a reduced rate or even for free. This tends to vary from term to term depending on class size and the information is rarely made public, so be sure and check.
Many websites are dedicated to learning Romanian. Some offer mini-courses, dictionaries and even games that can be played to help you learn to read and write Romanian. Try digitaldialects.com/Romanian.htm to start with.
Online forums and chat rooms can make learning exciting and give you the motivation to learn even faster. It's a good idea to let those that you are communicating with know that you are just beginning your Romanian studies. They will be inclined to help and will usually be much more patient when you make a mistake. Visit forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=504827 to check out a language forum.
Use one of the online voice chats programs so that you can practice speaking Romanian with a native speaker. Reading and writing cannot replace actually speaking the language. To become fluent in Romanian you must speak it and speak it often. A good program to try is easyromanian.com/romanian_classes_tutor.htm.
The chat programs pair a student with a native speaker for online chat sessions. These sessions, for which there is a fee, usually last an hour. During that time you will speak to each other in Romanian, with the native speaker correcting pronunciation and vocabulary.
Make sure that you visit Romanian-based news and entertainment websites as well. These will help with your reading skills, and the visits are also a way to make learning Romanian more enjoyable. Two good sites to visit are bistriteanul.ro/ and Capital.ro.
The downside to online courses and websites is that they often lack the conversational aspect that is so important to learning Romanian. Romanian must be spoken and spoken frequently to get the right accent and inflection to the words. For this you need to practice speaking Romanian.
If you can't fit voice chat sessions into your schedule, Pimsleur has an approach to conversational Romanian that is outstanding. It also lends itself well to individual study and requires the use of a tape recorder or digital recorder to practice your conversational skills. The program itself is on a CD so you will need both a CD player and a small voice recorder or cassette tape player. You can try it out on the Pimsleur website at pimsleur.com/Learn-Romanian and it works like this:
You will participate in a conversation in Romanian. The speaker on the recording acts as your partner in the dialogue. Turn on your voice recorder and press record. During the pauses in the recording that are designed for your responses, you will respond and it will be recorded. At the end of the lesson you can play it back and grade your pronunciation against that of the speaker from the course. This is an important step because you want to correct errors before they become bad habits.