Catalan/Introducció

Welcome!

Welcome to the WikiBooks Catalan course.

Method

This book presents simple bilingual texts with Catalan on the left, English on the right. Beneath the Catalan text is a phonetic transcription of the words with the stressed syllable in bold. A literal translation of the English can be found in parenthesis (like this) where the Catalan does not map well to English. You will sometimes see superscript numbers like this¹ - these are notes that can be found just below the bilingual text. Example below:

Lesson 1: D'on ets? - Where are you from?
català	English
Hola! D'on ets?¹ ɔlə! don ets?	Hello! Where are you from? (from-where you-are?)

NOTES
1: ets means you are when speaking informally to peers and people younger than you.

This book focuses on learning by input rather than learning by rote. This means, in practice:

Lessons are short.
Chunks of language, rather than individual words, are the focus.
Verb conjugation is slowly and unevenly exposed.
Explicit grammar is kept to a minimum except when it clarifies.

How to Use This Book

Aim for one lesson at day.
If audio is available, you should listen to the dialogue a few times without reading along to see how much you understand. At first, this will likely be zero, but you can get a sense for the rhythm of the language. Later, you will notice words that you don't understand. This is fine.
Listen and read the Catalan text at the same time. Catalan has silent letters, usually at the end of a word. See if you notice them, then check against the phonetic transcription.
When you find a word you don't know, make a guess and then check the English translation to see if you were right.
Practice reading the lines of text, one at a time, after the speaker. Notice intonation differences for questions, or when the speaker pauses (or doesn't).
Finally, try the translation exercises. The answers are found on the same page.

Other things to try:

Oral change up: If the sentence reads "I am from Barcelona", try changing it, orally to "Are you from Barcelona?".
Make flashcards for words that you struggle with.
The next day¹, listen to the audio recording and transcribe it. Check your transcription against the Catalan text.
Copy the English text to a notebook. The next day, attempt to translate it into Catalan. Check your translation.

1: Spacing out your learning is more effective than doing it all in the same day. This is called recall practice.

More Resources

The Catalan language is spoken by approximately 12 million people. For more information see: [1]

For learning resources on the internet see:

Enciclopèdia.cat [2], el teu portal del coneixement en llengua catalana. (Your web portal to the Catalan language knowledge)
Gran diccionari de la llengua catalana [3]
English-Catalan dictionary [4] [Dictionary stats (last updated 20th January 2014)
Catalan verb conjugations [5], [6]
Consorsi per a la normalització lingüística [7]