Hi! Do you know of good resources for people looking to learn the pronunciation rules for Catalan? I don't know that I'm looking to necessarily dive in to learning a whole 'nother language at the moment, but I'd like to have a frame of reference for how Catalan sounds. I know it's Not Spanish, but as a native English speaker who has taken some Spanish, I'd like to know what it does sound like, because I automatically parse it as Spanish when I see it written, and I know that ain't it. Thanks!
Hello! Thank you for asking, it's always exciting when other people want to learn Catalan :)
Catalan has a lot of similarities in vocabulary and grammar to Spanish, but in terms of pronunciation it's very different—this is a big sticking point for a lot of learners. The hardest part, if you're coming from Spanish, is definitely the vowels. Unlike Spanish, there are seven vowels in Catalan—the e and the o each have a more open and a more closed pronunciation, which is hard to explain, but they'll demonstrate it in the video below. (This system of seven vowels is actually present in most Romance languages, and Spanish is an exception 😅) Catalan vowels are also fun because if they're not stressed, they change/simplify! In the western dialects of Catalan, they simplify like this:
a -> a
è, é -> é
i -> i
ò, ó -> ó
u -> u
That one's not too crazy, but in eastern dialects, they simplify wayyyy down, and it takes a lot of practice before you get accustomed to it:
a, è, é -> [ə] (this is a schwa, it's like the 'uh' sound in English)
i -> i
ò, ó, u -> u
This video from Easy Catalan does a great job of showing the pronunciation of the language, explaining all the different letters, giving examples, and letting you hear spoken Catalan! I brought up the difference between eastern/western dialects in vowel reduction because that's the only thing they don't mention, but it does show up in the video—the person in the green jacket speaks with the eastern pronunciation, and the person in the sweater with the western pronunciation.