Complete Catalan Beginner to Intermediate Course: Learn to read, write, speak and understand a new language (Teach Yourself Complete Courses)

Just as expected.

This book reminds me of the adage: Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. This book provides the user with the "rules" of the grammar and pronunciation instead of just providing lists of "helpful phrases." The integrated audio is good for hearing the words and knowing how to correctly pronounced. The exercises do a good job a reinforcing what was just taught. The lessons are kept short, which helps with being able to learn and retain the new information. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn Catalan and about the culture.

As far as I know(I experienced), 'The Audio' service does not work on Kindle fire and Kindle for Android. Therefore, I had to refund it. Did I have to activate something or else?

I don't usually leave reviews on Amazon, but I had to speak up against this book.The lessons begin right away with complex dialogues--and I mean, COMPLEX dialogues that you can't quite understand even with the vocabulary list given--with a dozen or more colloquial expressions dumped on you with each dialogue. The audio is available online only (and by app, but some of the tracks do not work on my old iPhone SE); the speakers speak at native-speaker speed, very fast, and one of the speaker is quite mumbly and difficult to make out the words (especially given that Catalan is a slurry language to begin with), never mind imitate. There are no audio tracks reading out the verb conjugations, or even any of the vocab words; just the dialogues and some exercises and a few select phrases here and there. Oh, and the names of the letters are on the audio only, not at all in the book; I had to look that up elsewhere.Things like grammar and basic vocabulary are introduced painfully slowly, relative to the cascade of idioms and colloquialisms--the grammatical working of which are not at all explained---and I have seen many irregular verb conjugations now, but still don't know the regular verb conjugations with any confidence.I know enough Spanish and French to be able to pick out some cognates and understand the basic grammar--I understand that this is the kind of thing that Catalan speakers hate to hear, but this book is THAT bad: you have to know Spanish AND French to be able to figure out what's going on at all!--but five chapters in, I still can't say a basic sentence with any confidence, and there are many, many words I cannot pronounce with any confidence. The difference between ó and ò, and é and è, is never made clear in the audio; and, worse, each speaker has a different inflection (presumably regional, but on a book for beginners?) on how they pronounce these and unstressed vowels! What happens to final consonants is never clearly explained; you just need to figure that out by listening to the audio over and over... which is difficult, because each audio track combines several dialogues and exercises, so you can't easily repeat just one segment. Sometimes the audio will randomly say a few words to make a point, and I can't find where in the book they have these words listed... because the words are just boldfaced examples in a paragraph somewhere. In fact, there is no part of the audio that does the standard, "Repeat after me"; just a bunch of mumbly native-speed breezes through whatever.There are many vocab words that I cannot find in the dictionary at the end, because they are part of an idiom or conjugated. The book would be completely useless had it not been for the Internet... and what kind of a thing is that to say about a text book? On top of this, it has a common failing among language textbooks of assuming that any word you've seen flashing by at some point is etched indelibly in your memory; so, if you've seen the word for a grandfather somewhere, you won't see it again when you finally learn how to say grandmother.It is good enough for me--I am learning, and I will learn a lot, I can see--so I'll keep it, but I do not recommend it, and I'll be watching a bunch of YouTube videos to supplement it... and having to watch YouTube videos is exactly what I wanted to avoid by getting this book. Forget about carrying to book around wherever you go and learning by reading and talking to yourself, or listening to the audio casually and learning by osmosis while cooking dinner; you have to have both the book and good Internet connection to do anything useful.[Update 6/16/2023: returned the book after all. Found MP3 files for another textbook, and I learned more in a day just listening to the recordings than I had the whole time I had this book. Getting that other textbook instead.]

The book is supposed to be accompanied by an audio guide that is unfortunately available only online, after a rather painful and cumbersome online subscription to the site TeachYourself.com. Even then, it is really hard to synchronize the lessons in the manual with the online streaming, the latter not being by any logical means related to the actual chapters in the printed manual.As a method, particularly for a rare language as Catalan where not much information on pronunciation could be found otherwise, it is at least counterintuitive and certainly very frustrating, making this manual unusable. I do not understand why the authors did not signal the major flaw that their book came with; ultimately it is their own effort that is being wasted.I sincerely do not recommend spending money on this book, or on any other that may bear the yellow TeachYourself logo.

The best English language course I've found on how to speak Catalan. Still i'd would prefer that a "Dummy's" guide for Catalan (that was in English). If this book doesn't work for you, you're basically going to have to learn Spanish in order to learn Catalan.

Really comprehensive introduction to the language, with in depth grammar, verb conjugations, adj, adv etc. plus a bidirectional dictionary. Nicely structured and laid out, w lots of examples and exercises. Impressed. The online pronunciation content is super helpful too - some of Catalan is very like Spanish, but lots certainly isn't. These Teach Yourself books are great!

This is by far one of the best language learning book I've ever possessed. It guides you through the basic up to some of the more challenging aspects of the language. One of the things that got me really excited about this book is the fact that it has the key to the exercises, as it helps me to see whether I really got the answer right or not. Believe it or not, not all language learning books out there are this well thought and complete as this one. Cheers, and happy studying, y'all! 🤩

This new book reached me in perfect condition. The text is clearly reproduced on good quality paper. There is no colour included on the pages but the book does not suffer because of this. The course is well laid out and well presented. I am looking forward to using this book when I start my Catalan studies. Access to online audio support is freely available on the Teach Yourself website.

I am thrilled with this purchase! The book has grammar, explanations and excellent audios [downloaded according to the book instructions]. Thanks to Amazon for having this book in their platform. This book will teach you grammar and it will make you enjoy the process of learning.

Uno dei pochi corsi di catalano veramente completo, efficace, conciso,moderno-Unico handicap: e' su base inglese, Quindi per fare questo corso bisogna aver una conoscenza, seppure generica, della lingua inglese.