Wannabe Polyglot

Hi everyone! In this episode I invited my friend Andrea to talk about the Catalan language, Catalan culture, and more! See below for a more detailed breakdown of topics and when they appear, some corrections for errors I made in the episode, and links to the Catalan resources mentioned in the video.

Topics

0:00- Podcast Updates/Current Plan for Episodes

3:12- Introducing Current Episode and Guest

4:32- Andrea's Story/Past with Catalan

8:39- My Story with Catalan

10:18- Andrea talks about being able to understand Catalan better than she can speak it

13:26- Many Catalan words are similar to French and Spanish but Catalan still has lots of unique words

15:11- The letter 'x' in Catalan and some fun words with it

17:29- We both talk about our habit of going from Spanish to Catalan and confusion with false friends

19:50- Catalan words sometimes look the same as English words because of its unique spelling

20:54- The Catalan Duolingo course

22:40- Catalan representation (or lack thereof) and people not knowing about it

23:50- Is Catalan a 'minority language?' (I talk about the number of speakers)

24:55- Catalan shows on Netflix (in the US)

26:22- TV3, the most popular Catalan TV channel (news, shows, performances, Youtube channel)

31:58- Weird sentences in the Catalan Duolingo course Andrea has seen

34:37- What resources you can use to learn Catalan

35:43- Our experiences with the Catalan Duolingo course and its pros and cons

38:11- Where else Catalan is spoken outside Catalonia

39:47- The unique Catalan past tense

42:44- Catalan weak pronouns and their (in)famous combinations

48:00- Catalan Christmas culture weird to foreigners (caganer, cagatió, capgrossos)

53:29- Music Recommendations and Wrapping Up

Corrections

16:44- I misspell 'xarxa' (net/network in Catalan)

38:20- Alghero (Alguer in Catalan) is in Sardinia, not Sicily

39:50- The tense is the periphrastic past (not passive periphrastic, which I remembered from Latin)

40:27- vaig anar means I went not I ate (that would be vaig menjar)

42:34- I meant to say 'literary' instead of 'historical' since another past periphrastic is used colloquially

45:32- "tell it to me" would be digues-m'ho (not "diu-me'l")

Resources

Hi everyone! I love learning languages and talking about languages, so I started this podcast. For my first episode, I talked about who I am, my language learning journey/abilities and weaknesses, and shared some interesting facts about my mother tongue Telugu. I hope you enjoy!