I have officially started learning Catalan! I am excited to start my language journey. Dr. Soloway recommended this program and I am interested. I am a Political Science major with a Spanish minor, hoping to study abroad in Barcelona the fall of my Junior year.
I am choosing to learn Catalan for numerous reasons. First, because it will really help me when I am abroad, it is a great addition to my Spanish minor, and I already have a good foundation as Spanish and Catalan are similar in many ways. Also, I went to Barcelona a few years ago and I remember my tour guide telling me that the Catalans want to break away from Spain and become their own independent country, with Catalan as the official language. I think this will be a great opportunity to be immersed in this environment and work and study and use the skills I will develop in this course.
I started meeting with a teacher named Estevam on Italki.com. He is from Portugal and he is a polyglot. He speaks and teaches 8 Romance languages. He is a really good teacher and he started by teaching me the similarities between Spanish and Catalan. He showed me how to convert some Spanish words to Catalan words. For example “tiene” or “have” can be converted into the Catalan word for have by using some rules. In Catalan any time there is an “ie” it changes to “e” and words can't end in e or n so “tiene” is converted to “te”. He has taught me the alphabet and the pronunciation of each letter; again, pretty similar to Spanish. There are two letters that we don’t have in our alphabet which are the se-ten-cada or “ç” which is pronounced like an s, and the el-jem-in-ada or “l.l” which is pronounced like an l, then a stop, then an l. I learned common conversation phrases like “Hola com estes” or “how are you” and how to respond to that question accordingly. I also learned about the vowels and accents in Catalan. Catalan has 7 vowels, and they have something called “open” and “closed” accents. They have their regular a,e,i,o, and u; but they have 2 versions of e’s and o’s. The é is an open accent e and is pronounced in a word like “prey”. Whereas, the è is a closed accent e and is pronounced in a word like “get”. There is also the open ó which is pronounced in a word like “note”, and the closed ò which is pronounced in a word like “not”.
I am excited to continue learning Catalan and I am particularly excited to start meeting with my language partner. I think that though Italki is working for me so far, face to face speaking will be a great learning method. I hope I can answer any of her English questions if she has along the way so we can mutually benefit from this experience!
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Having a teacher on a website that has a lot of knowledge in multiple languages must be extremely useful, and learning the differences between Catalan and Spanish such as open and closed accents, as well as the conversion methods between the languages seems very helpful. Starting to meet with a language partner in person as well seems like it could add to your learning and acquisition.