katilica Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5474 days ago 70 posts - 109 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: French, Catalan
| Message 1 of 6 08 January 2010 at 7:40am | IP Logged |
Are there any resources anyone here would recommend for learning Catalan? I know about parla.cat and am currently looking through the 'wikilibro catalán' (Spanish Catalan Wikibook). Are there any sites that have clear rules for pronounciation? I went all sorts of crazy today and decided to learn Catalan after spending a few minutes on Youtube. Any other comments about the language are welcome and I would also appreciate insight on the difficulty of this language.
P.S. Recommendations for books and other materials are greatly appreciated.
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davidwelsh Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5532 days ago 141 posts - 307 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, Norwegian, Esperanto, Swedish, Danish, French Studies: Polish, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Mandarin
| Message 2 of 6 08 January 2010 at 4:57pm | IP Logged |
I've done the first 10-12 lessons on parla.cat and I think it's pretty good. I've made BYKI lists for all the lessons I've done so far.
Some other good resources I've found are:
An online bilingual dictionary
An online monolingual dictionary
A grammar overview
Intercat, which has loads of links to Catalan newspapers, radio and other resources
Videos from the Digui Digui course
Verb conjugations
The Generalitat de Catalunya's language website. (This is in Catalan only, but there's loads of great stuff on there. Click on "Aprendre català" in the menu on the left.)
Viure a Catalunya - Vocabulari en imatges and Comencem a parlar, beginners' textbooks you can download for free in PDF form.
Font del Cat, a free online course for Romance language speakers (available in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian)
I've also bought the Oxford Catalan-English Dictionary. It's really designed for Catalan speakers who are learning English, but I'd definitely recommend it.
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Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6668 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil
| Message 3 of 6 09 January 2010 at 1:12am | IP Logged |
There's Assimil Catalan available (at least) in Spanish and French.
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alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7224 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish
| Message 4 of 6 09 January 2010 at 4:49am | IP Logged |
katilica,
You can look for cultural clubs in the United States. I have found three here in Canada and a person in Vancouver was more than willing to provide information for me. IMO native speakers are the most important resource. Of course the commercial products available for purchase in places like Amazon.com. (Assimil, TY, Colloquial)
Unfortunately PONS is not for sale in Amazon.com.
Digui Digui is fairly old, but I cannot think of a place that sells the entire set. Most vendors I have seen sells only part of it. If you saw all the things that comes with it, the price tag is very expensive.
Finally a presumed replacement course for Digui Digui and the first part was released about four years ago. It is now on part three. Each part I presume has only three books and some cds. In my case I had to purchase each item separately. Similar to Digui Digui it is expensive if you buy it all.
That is all I know for now.
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katilica Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5474 days ago 70 posts - 109 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: French, Catalan
| Message 5 of 6 09 January 2010 at 7:46am | IP Logged |
Thanks. I had gone through most of these sights already but the grammar link you gave is really a Godsend.
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Kerol Bilingual Hexaglot Newbie Spain Joined 6126 days ago 13 posts - 24 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, English, Italian, Portuguese
| Message 6 of 6 02 February 2010 at 1:20pm | IP Logged |
Well, there are many good resources for the Catalan language online, but in Catalan. I don't know much about any bilingual ones that haven't been mentioned, so I'll add only these two, in case you need them.
Another bilingual dictionary: http://www.diccionaris.cat (Try català-anglès or anglès-català in the scrolling menu)
And a verb conjugation site: www.verbscatalans.com/
As for the insight on the difficulty, well, if you speak good Spanish and you're studying French too, you have some good ground to understand much of it. But pronunciation and spelling can be a bit tricky.
You'll have already heard that Catalan looks half-way between Spanish and French. Well, kind of. The Romance distances are more like these:
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