| Catalan Grammar | Eirik Hektoen, 2008 |
The following are the books that I personally have found most useful as aids for studying Catalan. I am not including any of the many standard textbooks used for classrooom teaching here, as I haven't really come across one that I would like to recommend, such books are generally chosen for you if you enroll in a course, and in any case they are not very useful for self-study. Nor have I included the big, authoritative grammars (Gramàtica del català contemporani, 3 volumes) and dictionaries (Diccionari de l'Institut d'Estudis Catalans, usually abbreviated to DIEC)—even though they may be excellent books—since I don't think they are the most useful choice for a language student.
Catalan: A Comprehensive Grammar
Max W. Wheeler, Alan Yates, Nicolaus Dols
Routledge, London, 1999
I have already mentioned how much I like this book in the Introduction. It is a great resource, containing all the precise technical details of the Catalan grammar that you could ever need to know (as far as I can tell), but being so well written that reading it never gets dull.
Gramàtica de la llengua catalana: Descriptiva, normativa, diàtopica, diastràtica
Antoni M. Badia i Margarit
Edicions Proa, Barcelona, 1994
I only bought this book recently and haven't had much chance to read it yet, so all I can say is that it is a single-volume comprehensive grammar that looks very good, and which I think I will find very useful in future.
Larousse diccionari compact: català anglès, English Catalan
Larousse Editorial, Barcelona, 2000
I have bought several bilingual dictionaries, but this has turned out to be the best choice for me by far. It is comprehensive (90.000 words and expressions, 120.000 translations, according to the blurb) but typeset in a compact and very clear style. In addition to translations, it includes pronunciations in IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) and grammatical categories including noun genders and whether verbs are transitive or intransitive. It also has a brief list of verb conjugations in an appendix, but this list is not complete (it is missing veure, for example), and it would have been more useful if there were references to the conjugations of the irregular verbs directly in the dictionary entries.
Diccionari manual de la llengua catalana
Enciclopèdia Catalana, Barcelona, 1998 (2nd ed.)
This, for me, is the golden middle ground: a dictionary which is large and comprehensive (55.000 entries, 117.000 definitions), but in a relatively compact single volume. It is, basically, the Catalan equivalent of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English. It includes a verb conjugation guide for both regular and irregular verbs, and for the irregular verbs it includes a reference to the relevant model verb in the main dictionary entries. It also indicates areas of usage (music, geography, ...), typical intentions of usage (ironically, pejoratively, ...) and similar additional information about the keywords (colloquial, vulgar, figurative, ...).
The only serious omission in this dictionary is that it does not include word pronunciations. This is a shame, as phonetic information (in IPA, of course) would turn this into the perfect monolingual dictionary for learners of Catalan.
Els verbs conjugats
Joan Baptista Xuriguera
Editorial Claret, Barcelona, year not indicated (7th ed.)
This is a complete guide to the conjugation of Catalan verbs in a small pocket-sized book. It has 120 main entries—double page spreads listing all the different forms of selected model verbs—and an index with more than 8.800 verbs (all the verbs in the DIEC) referring to the main entries. The index entry for quantificar, for example, refers to the main entry for trencar, which although it is a regular verb in the same class as cantar has its own entry to spell out the c/qu spelling alterations (trenco, trenques, etc.).
There are a number of similar books in the shops, but this is the one that has the most successful design in my opinion. My only complaint about it is that it redundantly includes all the different forms with auxiliary verbs in every entry; that is, the analytic preterite (vaig trencar, ...) and all the perfect forms: the perfect (he trencat, ...), the pluperfect (havia trencat, ...), the ‘analytic preterite perfect’ (vaig haver trencat, ...), the future perfect (hauré trencat, ...), the conditional perfect (hauria trencat, ...), and so on. This is a waste of space as it is obvious how to construct all these forms from the single conjugation of the auxiliary verb and the infinitive or past participle of the main verb. If this redundancy had been removed the book would have been half as big and fit more easily in a shirt pocket, but perhaps it would have looked less impressive to a casual buyer in a bookshop and therefore sold less.
Colloquial Catalan: The Complete Course for Beginners
Toni Ibarz and Alexander Ibarz
Routledge, London and New York, 2005
This is a standard paperback-sized beginner's level self-study book, and comes with accompanying CDs or audio cassettes. It contains 20 chapters with dialogues, vocabulary, points of grammar, other relevant language notes, and exercises. It is of course limited how far anyone can go in learning a language by self-study from a small book like this, but I found that it was a very helpful reference in studying and memorizing the basic elements of Catalan in the early stages.
Teach Yourself Catalan: A Complete Course for Beginners
Alan Yates
Hodder and Stoughton, Sevenoaks, Kent, 1975 (reissued 1993)
Again, a standard paperback-sized beginner's level self-study book. This is broadly similar to the Colloquial Catalan, but somewhat dated now (although that shouldn't matter much).
Learn 101 Catalan Verbs in 1 Day
Rory Ryder
Tsunami Systems, Barcelona, 2004
This is a tiny, cheerful book to help complete beginners learn the meaning and most important conjugations of 101 common verbs using cartoons as mnemonic aids. It could easily be dismissed as too trivial, but I found it to be very handy in the very beginning.
Tinc un dubte: El petit llibre del català correcte
Rudolf Ortega
La Magrana, Barcelona, 2008
This is a smallish paperback with tips for avoiding common mistakes and resolving various uncertainties in Catalan. It has four parts, covering orthography, elementary grammar, common errors, and typical doubts; and with each part consisting of numbered items, more or less one page per item. A typical item, for example, explains when to use que and què in relative clauses (you use què when it is preceded by a preposition: de què...). It is very readable, even for a beginner in Catalan, but tends to focus most on the mistakes and doubts of Castilian speakers learning Catalan.
Diccionari pràctic de qüestions gramaticals
Joan Abril Español
Edicions 62, Barcelona, 2001 (3rd ed.)
This is quite similar in size and concept to Tinc un dubte (above), but is organized as a single list of items organized alphabetically by their headings. The items read more like grammatical rules rather than informal advice. I personally didn't like this so much, mainly because the content seems to be written as a brief grammar reference, but the alphabetical organization is very unintuitive. It is very strange, for example, to have a section with the heading ‘Coincidència de dues preposicions febles’ under ‘C’ in an alphabetical list (even with a cross-reference at ‘Preposicions febles’ under ‘P’).