Telling someone what to do

Romanian does not build a polite command. It takes the voi form of the present tense and uses it unchanged. Nothing is added, nothing is removed. This is the form the exam's speaking section wants, because you are talking to a stranger.

Look down the middle column and the right one. They are the same column twice. That is the whole rule.

The infix stays away, exactly as it always did. a vorbi puts -esc- in four of its six present forms and never at noi or voi. The polite command is the voi form, so the infix is absent there too: Vorbiți!, never a form built on vorbesc.

Talking to one person you call tu, the command is also a present-tense form — but which one depends on the verb. The default is the el / ea form. Verbs that take no object take the tu form instead.

Read the last column down. Seven rows take the el / ea form and two take the tu form, and the two are the verbs where nothing is being done to anything: you go, you sleep. You cross a street, you read a book, you speak a language.

Treat this as a bet, not a law. It holds for every verb on this page and for every verb in your ledger, but Romanian has verbs where it comes out the other way — you meet the main one, vezi, in the next table. When a new verb arrives, store its command with it, the same way you store the -ez- bit.

Nine familiar commands are not borrowed from anywhere. These are the ones you will hear most days, so they are worth having cold.

Look at the polite column. Eight of the nine are still just the voi form. Only a fi breaks it: its voi form is sunteți, and its command is Fiți! — one exception in the whole system.

A negative command is built from the infinitive, not from any of the forms above.

The nine irregulars exist only in the affirmative. Column three is the infinitive every time, including for a veni, a lua, a face and a fi. So the pair Vino! / Nu veni! share no letters after the stem — and there is nothing extra to memorise for it.

You already put mă te se ne vă se in front of the verb: mă grăbesc, "I'm in a hurry". In an affirmative command the pronoun jumps behind the verb and hooks on with a hyphen. In a negative one it goes straight back in front.

Du-te! is the everyday way to say "off you go" — the same Du! from the irregular list, with the pronoun attached.

One exchange in the street, polite throughout, which is what the speaking exam asks for.