Catalan phrasebook
Catalan (Català ), spoken in Catalonia, Land of Valencia (where it is called Valencià ), Balearic Islands (where it is sometimes called MallorquÃ), Andorra (where it is the only official language), the south of France (north Catalonia) and the Sardinian city Alghero, is spoken by about 7 million people, making it the 8th language in the European Union. It is, like Spanish and French, a Romance language, and people who hear it for first time have the impression that it's a mix between them. It's a separate language however, as old as the other Romance languages, and you will be very welcome if you try to say some words while you are in a Catalan-speaking region.
Unlike English, Catalan nouns (words for things) have genders. Every noun is either masculine, like home ("man") or feminine, like dona ("woman"). The gender of things doesn't always seem to follow logically from the meaning of the word; why a house (casa) is feminine but a car (cotxe) is masculine is just one of the vagaries of the language. Fortunately, the gender of a noun is usually but not always indicated by the last letter of the word; -a indicates feminine nouns, but as a difference from Spanish, masculine words don't have a common ending.
Adjectives also have gender and number. Like nouns, -a usually indicates the feminine form. Adding an -s at the end of an adjective makes it plural. Adjectives need to match the noun they describe in both gender and number. For example, borratxo "drunk", when modifying les dones ("the women"), makes les dones borratxes.
In this guide, where genders of nouns or adjectives comes up, we use the form "/a" to differentiate. It should be clear from context when to use the feminine and when to use the masculine form.
Pronunciation Guide
Written Catalan does not seem as phonetic as Spanish or Italian to an anglophone foreigner, but it is definitely less complicated to pronounce than French or English. It has variations from one region to other; the model presented here is the standard pronunciation, similar to the language of the region near Barcelona. Each of the major dialectal areas has its differences in pronunciation and vocabulary (just like English does in Britain, by the way): Western (Lleida province and Ebre river basin), Balearic (Balearic islands), Valencian, etc...
Vowels
To know how to pronounce vowels in Catalan, is necessary to know the strong syllable of the word; a, i, o change if are in the strong syllable or a weak one.
In the case of e and o in a strong syllable, you can only know how it sounds if has the accent sign. è sounds always as 'e' in "bed", é sounds as 'ea' in "bear", ò sounds as 'o' in "bond" and ó sounds as the first component of the diphthong 'ow' in "low".
Consonants
Phrase list
Basics
Problems
Numbers
Time
Clock time
NOTE: Catalan express time using a scheme based on quarters of hour:
Duration
Days
Months
Writing time and date
June 13th of 2004: tretze (13) de juny de 2004
Colors
Transportation
Bus and train
Directions
Taxi
Lodging
Money
Eating
Catalan phrasebook nightlife, bars, clubs and pubs.
Shopping
Driving
Authority
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