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Catalan and Basque Resources | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Gallo1801 Diglot Senior Member Spain Joined 4903 days ago 164 posts - 248 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Croatian, German, French | Message 1 of 14 01 June 2012 at 3:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Thinking of getting Iniciación al Euskera and Catalán sin Esfuerzo, both Assimil
courses... How are they? Are there alternative courses that work better? I´d like to delve into them down the road, but want to shop around for resources before I leave Spain. Prefer Castillian medium. Thanks for you insights! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5866 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 2 of 14 01 June 2012 at 8:23am | IP Logged | ||
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The Assimil Catalan course is wonderful, i wholeheartedly recommend it. I've looked through the Basque course but never gone through it, so i can't really comment much on it, but like the name says, it's really just an "iniciación", i think it's around 49 lessons.
For Catalan, you might also be interested in http://www.parla.cat/. For Euskera, you might want to check out http://www.hiru.com/ (in particular, ikasten) and el curso Deusto de euskera. Otherwise, just check out used bookstores and see what they've got in stock. For Catalan you'll certainly find at least some basic grammars and dictionaries. I believe Catalan's even got Teach Yourself/Colloquial courses. For Euskera, you could check to see what books and resources the "euskaltegis" use for preparing for the EGA and search them out. Also, take a look at what's over at uz-translations.net to get an idea of some of what's out there. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alexander86 Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom alanguagediary.blogs Joined 4982 days ago 224 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 3 of 14 01 June 2012 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been learning Catalan for 6/7 months in a class based environment, but I also have Teach Yourself Catalan
which I think is pretty good if you take it as a base for learning i.e. don't rely on it to teach you There's lots of stuff online to teach Catalan etc, parla.cat being one example. I'm actually developing a website to teach Catalan at the moment which I hope to have up later this summer There's lots of media you can watch to, Catalunya Radio is brilliant, so is TV3 (the Catalan TV channel) and the newspapers ara.cat, elperiodico.cat etc. If you speak Spanish you can pick up a lot through osmosis. Basque is harder.... =) I have 'Colloquial Basque' but I haven't really had the time to go through it.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 4 of 14 02 June 2012 at 2:02am | IP Logged | ||
There's also a VERY active and vibrant Catalan twitter community out there, full of writers, teachers, societies and groups that are worth checking out. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Alexander86 Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom alanguagediary.blogs Joined 4982 days ago 224 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 5 of 14 02 June 2012 at 10:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, Twitter is a good mention too. I'm a cycling fan, so I often follow the races in Catalan or German, just so I can
learn while I read, instead of just using English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5866 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 6 of 14 11 June 2013 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I thought i would bump this as today i found this article: Unámonos para hablar euskera en Internet. It seems there's a new site to let people practice speaking Euskara online: http://www.mintzanet.net/.
I've also started on Assimil's Iniciación al euskara course and, keeping in mind that i've only done the first 12 lessons, i've got to say that it's the most difficult Assimil course i've ever gone through. I feel exhausted after each lesson. Starting each lesson it feels like starting from scratch and that i'll never be able to understand it, but after reading through all the notes (in this course the notes are longer than the dialogues -- often times there will be two short sentences at the top and the rest of the page filled with notes), the word-for-word translations, and comparing the Basque with the Spanish translation it starts to make sense. Starting a new lesson always feels overwhelming at first, though. Around lesson 8 (zortzigarren ikaskaia) i finally started to get used to Basque word order, at least what they've introduced up to now, and that felt like a real achievement. I'll let you know more as i go through the course, as i realize it's still early. So far i'd say if you really want to learn Basque, it seems like a great course to start your studies off with. If you're just curious (like me), it might be a bit intense. Looking at the grammatical appendix at the back of the book and seeing all those cases makes my head spin! EDIT: I thought it might be worth mentioning that while sometimes it feels impossibly hard, the language is so interesting. Sometimes as i'm listening to the audio i'll stop focusing on the meaning and just listen to the sounds. The dialogs have all been pretty interesting, too, there's even been a lesson about seduction! ("Your eyes, your sweet lips, soft skin...") Edited by Crush on 11 June 2013 at 3:39pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 14 12 June 2013 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||
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A nice supplement might be the graded readers from "Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat". They're in Catalan, are labelled A1, A2, or B1, and come with an mp3 cd in the back containing a recording of the text.
As is common for graded readers at that level, they're monolingual. Unlike some, they don't have footnotes, in any language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7222 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 8 of 14 12 June 2013 at 5:13am | IP Logged | ||
They were cheaper in Amazon.es, but most are no longer available there. These supplements probably work better with the intended texts, but buying all three levels of the teachers, student, exercise books, and cds separately are pricey. Now it seems the texts are with a cd, but I am not sure if it is the same audio as the separate cds as before. I personally will not buy the texts all over again just to find out. Luckily I bought mine from Canada, which was cheaper in comparison to buying it in Spain. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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