ah, so you want to learn romanian. That's nice, our language is beautiful. But the grammar is not that easy. About contractions: the sign - shows that you should pronounce in the same sylabus both words. So if you have ,,ce-ai'' you will pronounce ceai, and not ce ai, like 2 sylabus. It is harder with the pronounciation, coz I have no ideea how could I translate this things in order to be understandable for you. It's good that you want to learn romanian, but it will be easier when you will arrive there to understand it. Good voyage to you

This should do the trick :) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Romanian_contractions As for pronunciation, you would just pronounce the words as they are written. For example, "ce-i" is pronounced as "chei", "m-am" is pronounced as "mum", and "nu-i" is pronounced as "nooi". But when it's a word like "i-aţi", this "ţ" is pronounced as "ts", and the "i" at the end is silent; so "i-aţi" would be pronounced as "yuts." I'm not fluent in Romanian, I've just spent enough time there to pick up a bit. I hope you have fun on your trip :)

If I understand you correctly, this is similar to "don't","wouldn't","you'd" etc. For example "m-am" means "I made something with myself" "m" implies the self and "am" is the auxiliary from Perfect Composed tense of Indicative. For example "M-am dus in parc." Means "I went to the park". Here the subject which is the self is "M-" "Nu-i" means "it isn't" or "Nu este" A common difficulty is with the construction: "ia" vs "i-a" "ia" means "take" (2nd person vocative) while "i-a" is in the Perfect Composed and means He/she did smth to/for him/her. Example: "ia cartea aceea de pe raft" (take that book from the shelf) "Paul i-a cumparat o carte" (Paul bought him/her a book) I hope this clarifies it a bit.

can you give me your skype id?