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To start Catalán with Romance knowledge | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4291 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 1 of 11 27 January 2015 at 1:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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I had an idea to learn some Catalán as Cataluña are my favourite comunidad of Spain
and Barcelona my favourite city (of the world). I also usually speak with Cataláns (in castellano) mostly if they are from Spain. What is a good, fairly straightforward method to get a good handle on Catalán, not to put it so rigourous as my other languges, with the caveat that I have a high level of Spanish, and have studied (not continuously though) French since 2004, Portuguese since 2005, and Italian since 2012, thus have a fairly good idea of Romance languages? I found El Catalán sin esfuerzo but as always, the audio is very expensive. I was thinking about just using this book and supplementing the audio with a free source somehow. I read good reviews of the book though, so I was thinking of buying it for myself. Anything else that is good? As said above, I do not mind sources that are used for native Hispanophones. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 11 27 January 2015 at 2:15am | IP Logged | |||||
I've been acquiring some Catalan passively by reading El Tentacle, an online webcomic by Àlex Roca. Also, I'm making parallel texts from GlobalVoices.org Català and the Spanish translations/originals. El País Edició Català has Spanish translations available. I'm reading Meddysong's Catalan log. I've had a look at Parla.Cat which is multimedia, free (with paid tutor option). The course looks to be quite thorough and interesting. I've already found a copy of a dvd series to mine for subs 2srs and a good online grammar. Right now, I'm trying to talk myself out of it. Do I really want to learn yet another Iberian Romance language? Will I take up more variations on the theme and go for Mirandês, Asturian and Galego too? ¡Nooooo! ¡Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhh!  Edited by iguanamon on 27 January 2015 at 4:29pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4890 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 3 of 11 27 January 2015 at 6:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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I did a few chapters of Teach Yourself Catalan and enjoyed it. There are a lot of negative
reviews on Amazon, but most seem to be written by idiots (e.g., "This is only useful if you can sit down and study the book as you listen to the CD's. I have not had time to do that," and the two-star "Today i recieve the book and CDs. I thought the book would be bigger." ) I would guess that, with all your Romance experience, you might be able to jump to native materials after a solid introduction. And I think I have some Catalan parallel texts buried on this machine somewhere; I can upload them if you like. And if I can find them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4640 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 4 of 11 27 January 2015 at 8:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know how good El catalán sin esfuerzo is, but with a high level of Spanish I personally think it is a waste of time and money to buy a traditional course. There is so much material out there for free. I recommend that you check out this free course for Spanish-speakers at Wikibooks.org. It is well structured and covers all the main grammar points from a Spanish-speaker's perspective.
In order to develop vocabulary and comprehension, I would go for buying a good dictionary and start reading books, online newspapers like El Periódico de Catalunya etc. There are also online dictionaries like this one at diccionaris.cat Once you are into the language I highly recommend the blog El catalán com cal - it is mainly targeted at Catalan speakers with the aim of avoiding "castellanismes", but is very useful for a Spanish-speakers as well for avoiding some of the most typical errors they do when speaking Catalan. As for oral comprehension, try searching for "catalan" or "catalan para hispanohablantes" on Youtube and you will find a lot of material. And from there you might want to check out the Catalan public broadcaster TV3 Catalunya where you can listen to radio and watch TV programmes "a la carta". Edit: Just a final afterthought: My personal experience is that it takes a remarkably short time to get an advanced passive level when you know Spanish. To speak it correctly requires a lot more, I think for that you really need to either find a good tutor, have lots of Catalan-speaking friends who are willing to help you out, or go and live in a Catalan-speaking environment. Edited by Ogrim on 27 January 2015 at 8:52am 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 11 27 January 2015 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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With your knowledge, you can start native materials from the beginning, yes. Just make sure to get used to the sound of the language (and to learn the spelling rules obviously!) before you start reading :)
El Catalán sin esfuerzo is Prof Argüelles' favourite Assimil course though, so this looks tempting even to me. Maybe you can find, eh, an alternative source for 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 6 of 11 27 January 2015 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You should also be able to get to tv3.cat to watch Catalan programming, at least the news.
Get as much listening in as you can. It'll make a huge difference, R. == EDIT: Ogrim beat me to it. Edited by hrhenry on 27 January 2015 at 4:53pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 7 of 11 27 January 2015 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've had good luck with Shoenhof's for Assimil books. They have the Catalan book for $11 and the book plus CDs for $42 here.
Edit: they are "out of stock" but will get it if you are willing to wait a bit. Edited by James29 on 27 January 2015 at 6:37pm 2 persons have 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 8 of 11 29 January 2015 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Parla.cat is also an amazing free resource with tons of audio, exercises, and texts. It's also much more "modern" than most other language sites i've seen. EDIT: I also wanted to mention a wonderful dictionary: http://www.dicdidac.cat/ - A dictionary for learners of Catalan. The definitions are simple and very descriptive, i just wish they had more entries. Here's what the homepage says:
Edited by Crush on 29 January 2015 at 7:00pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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