Anyone heard Catalan?
Has anyone heard or speak Catalan? If so, does it sound anything like Spanish?
4 Answers
Grammatically,,it should be:
Has (from verb to have) anyone heard or does (from verb to do) anyone speak
You cannot combine both in one sentence here Beatrice because the verbs used are totally different and combining them suggests that you can say/it is correct to say:
''Has anyone heard or [has anyone] speak'' This would sound awful/terrible and be amount to badly written English
So, instead, you should say Has anyone heard or does anyone speak
or Has anyone heard or has anyone spoken...etc...
Beatrice, I have both visted and stayed in the region of Cataluña notably seaside towns called Pineda de Mar and Calella along the north west coast of Spain about 1 hour and 45 minute train from the great city of Barcelona
It is an interesting language but it is not easy to understand, although, an understanding of Spanish will help you make some sense of it.I always found it easier to understand it written down than spoken.
amb = with per (Cat)=por (Sp) = for
I have been told it is supposed to be a mixture/blend of French and Spanish
I think Birdland knows it quite well - he has been there a number of times and there maybe others too
There was a thread released a while ago, by Kevin B I think, with a link to a video and a question asking who could understand the Catalan speech. If I find it I will place a link to it here Please see Silent's excellent thread for Kevin B's post
Here is a different thread about Catalan posted by Izanoni another highly respected member of our community link text
To me it seems a lot of the adjectives are similar (but with the endings cut off the masculine ones) but everything else is completely different, and they have different ways of pronouncing the letters and a few sounds that don't exist in Spanish or English.
They're not mutually intelligible at all, and the worst part is there are far far few resources available to learn Catalan than Spanish, especially for people who don't already speak Spanish. So even though I want to study it, I can't. I've only managed to find one book and it's not very good and i've no audio with it.
I don't plan to return here though so for the sake of a few months I've stopped trying.
A lot of people resent you and are very unfriendly if you speak to them in Spanish. It's a big culture shock. But there's also a lot of South Americans here who speak Spanish.
I don't want to stereotype, and there are plenty of exceptions, but in general Catalan people are very closed, and they tell me there's no word in Catalan for "friendly"
Here's a free site from the government to help people learn it:
http://www.parla.cat/
They also offer free classes in it, but I was always working at the times they were on.
Check out this thread:
