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Catalan - already speak French/Spanis | ||
Tags: Catalan | Linguistic relationships | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Greendog Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5271 days ago 47 posts - 52 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 1 of 6 07 July 2011 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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So in two days I'm going on a Spanish immersion trip to Barcelona. I wasn't planning to learn any Catalan (my Spanish isn't great so I wanted to focus on that before I left), but now I'm starting to feel like I'd like to speak a little bit of the local language so that I can fit in better - even just as a courtesy.
While I was looking through some Catalan online I was struck by the fact that it seems to be a vocalized version of french to some extent (very similar words, just without many of the silent letters) and very much a mix of Spanish and French. Basically my question is this: if I've achieved basic fluency in French and I have a good knowledge of Spanish, is there anything you can recommend to jump start my Catalan? It seems pointless to go through a book and relearn all the vocabulary and grammar rules when they seem to be almost the same. Also, are there any "tricks" you can tell me to translate between Spanish/French/English and Catalan? For example I know that almost any word with -tion is the same in French and is -cion in Spanish, so is there any rule (just making this one up) that any French word ending in -te will be -de in Catalan? Thanks a lot in advance! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| July Diglot Senior Member Spain Joined 5274 days ago 113 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishB2 Studies: French | Message 2 of 6 08 July 2011 at 2:29pm | IP Logged |
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I've been looking through a little bit Catalan this last week (I studied French years
ago and now study Spanish). Although the language has a lot of similarities with Spanish and French I'm not sure that the grammar is so similar that you could just map exactly what you already know onto Catalan and be done. For example, to express the equivalent of the Spanish pretérito perfecto, you have to use the verb To Go + infinitive, so that the Spanish 'vine' turns into 'vaig venir'. Which is pretty different. And that's something that has come up in the first eight pages of my textbook, so I'm sure there are probably lots of other grammatical issues. I'm using Assimil 'El catalan sin esfuerzo', which is widely available here in Spain and seems pretty interesting so far, even though it was published in 1979, so it may be somewhat out of date. Most resources for learning Catalan are in Spanish, so being well versed in that language is obviously going to be a huge bonus for you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 6 08 July 2011 at 5:51pm | IP Logged |
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I used the Assimil Catalan book in French, and I'd recommend it.
As for rules -- what I can think of off the top of my head: -tion words are ció, and in the plural the n reappears: -cións. Catalan has lost a lot of final N and NO that are preserved in Spanish, so this follows through the language -- hermano > germà but hermana > Germana hermanos > Germans hermanas >germanas It even holds for... (wait for it) Catalan > català but Catalana > catalana catalanes > catalans catalanas > catalanes So far, all the "missing Ns" I've seen are where the French equivalent ends with -on -an or -en, where the N itself is lost and occurs as a nasalisation of the previous vowel. -ent and -ant words are -ent and -ant in Catalan too. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Greendog Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5271 days ago 47 posts - 52 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 4 of 6 09 July 2011 at 2:20am | IP Logged |
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Ok thanks I'll try and pick up a book while I'm there. Even if I don't have time to study
it (I'm only there for two weeks) it should be something interesting to look at after I return. Do you have any suggestions for bookstores in Barcelona that sell language books? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| canada38 Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5496 days ago 304 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 5 of 6 09 July 2011 at 1:31pm | IP Logged |
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I don't have any suggestions about books, but I used www.parla.cat for a while. It's a
free website, or one can pay for a tutor, to learn the language. It's offered by the government of Catalonia. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Capsula Diglot Groupie Andorra Joined 5263 days ago 42 posts - 52 votes Studies: Catalan*, Spanish, English Studies: Italian | Message 6 of 6 12 July 2011 at 12:23am | IP Logged |
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Catalan is often described as a mixture of Spanish and French.
Some of the most important differences between Catalan and French/Spanish are: -The weak pronouns hi/en. They don't exist in Spanish. In French, they work quite different -however, most people don't even use them nowadays-. -The "perfet perifrastic" tense, which has no direct equivalent in Spanish/French. However, it's only one tense, and you can use the 'normal' tense as well, you'll be understood, despite the fact no one uses it. -The neutral vowel, schwa. However, in Barcelona it sounds much like an A (as in Spanish), only in Majorca and the islands it has a completely different sound. -Vocabulary. But nearly 100% of it is already shared with Spanish, French and English. For the other parts, it is a really very predictable language, if you already speak 1-2 romance languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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