Colloquial Catalan provides a step-by-step course in Catalan as it is written and spoken today. Combining a user-friendly approach with a thorough treatment of the language, it equips learners with the essential skills needed to communicate confidently and effectively in Catalan in a broad range of situations. No prior knowledge of the language is required.
Key features include:
âą progressive coverage of speaking, listening, reading and writing skills
âą structured, jargon-free explanations of grammar
âą an extensive range of focused and stimulating exercises
âą realistic and entertaining dialogues covering a broad variety of scenarios
âą useful vocabulary lists throughout the text
âą additional resources available at the back of the book, including a full answer key, a grammar summary and bilingual glossaries
Balanced, comprehensive and rewarding, Colloquial Catalan will be an indispensable resource both for independent learners and students taking courses in Catalan.
Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.
Subject pronouns: T, âyouâ, âheâ, âsheâ, etc.
Personal articles
Tu and vostĂš
The gender of nouns and adjectives
Welcome (benvinguda or benvingut) to our Catalan course! Our journey begins, like so many, at the airport, a typical place for meetings and greetings. At first you will be dealing with familiar situations and you may be able to make out the gist of the conversations in the opening dialogues, and perhaps even identify some words.
Throughout the course, we strongly recommend that you listen to the audio before looking at the text of the dialogue. In this way you will soon be able to cope with real situations in which Catalan is used. In such situations you will be talking to people without any written support, so start as you mean to finish!
Dialogue 1 (Audio 1: 7)
Rachel and Sara meet for the first time at Barcelona airport. Sara tries to find out if she is talking to the right person and welcomes Rachel to Barcelona.
Listen carefully to the audio twice and see how much you can recognise.
PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEM
La companyia Air Litoral anuncia l'arribada del vol AL673, procedent de Paris.
SARA
Perdona, ets la Rachel?
RACHEL
SĂ, sĂłc la Rachel Woodhouse.
SARA
Hola, jo sĂłc la Sara Font.
RACHEL
Encantada.
SARA
Igualment. Benvinguda a Barcelona.
RACHEL
GrĂ cies.
Vocabulary
l'arribada (f.)
arrival
del vol
of the flight
hola
hello
perdona
excuse me
ets
are you
sĂ
yes
sĂłc
I am
encantat, -da
delighted/pleased to meet you
igualment
so am I/equally
benvingut, -da
welcome
a
to
grĂ cies
thank you
From now on, to help focus on comprehension whilst you listen to the audio, dialogues will often be preceded by questions or other activities. In most cases the answers can be checked when you look at the written version of the dialogue. The language points belonging to this dialogue will be explained after the next dialogue; now go straight on to Dialogue 2.
Dialogue 2 (Audio 1: 8)
Two travellers, senyora Mata and Rosa Garcia, are met by a hotel representative (representant), senyor Massip, who mistakes senyora Mata for Rosa Garcia. As in Dialogue 1, listen to this dialogue twice before looking at the text.
