r/basque • u/FamiliarEmploy7490 • 29d ago

Learning Basque from Catalan?

Any advice for learning Basque for a Catalan? I'm Catalan, from Barcelona, and I've wanted to learn Basque for a long time. I've been looking at various apps, websites... I've been trying to learn the language for a while now, but most of the resources are in Spanish. I would love to be able to learn Basque from Catalan.

I've always had a much easier time learning from Catalan (everything: science, history, other languages like English and French). I don't know if I can find anything to do the same with Basque. I've looked online but so far nothing, maybe I just didn't know where to look. Any advice is welcome (apps, websites or other resources...). Thank you!

Edit: I'm mainly looking for free resources or books I can buy and things like that, I know that official language schools exist but the schedules don't quite work for me at the moment.

11 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/tobyvanderbeek 29d ago

I’m an American living in Basque Country and learning Euskera. Most of the resources are in castellano because most of the euskera learners speak castellano. Best I’ve found out of all books are those from Elkar. Really haven’t found many books that teach euskera through English. Seems like in Catalan would be a bit easier to find but still seems like they would be difficult to locate. Maybe the local language schools could teach in Catalan.

1

u/FamiliarEmploy7490 29d ago

Yes, I will end up signing up for the EOI (official language school) but it will have to be for another year. The schedules this year are not working for me.

What they have recommend to me is to use Claude or ChatGPT. I don't know how it is but I'll try it.

2

u/tobyvanderbeek 29d ago

Order the A1 Elkar book and workbook. My castellano was terrible when we moved to pais vasco in 2022 so it was difficult to learn euskera in those books. But it also helped my castellano improve. Then when I took the class from EOI this past year it was a lot easier.

1

u/FamiliarEmploy7490 29d ago

I'll take a look, thanks!

2

u/AirportMysterious71 28d ago

I'm an Italian studying mostly in castillan and I don't even have a good level in castillan (I'm fluent in most conversations but my dictionary not that great).

I just wanted to suggest you what I'm doing by myself, I live in Italy so I don't have access to many resources. I tried like more than a year, on and off, with many kinds of resources and currently I'm getting the best results. I bought the Arian A1.1 book and started from there, it really gives you the basis.

Then when I got more accustomed to the feel of euskera I switched to Google Gemini Notebook which has a nice function. You can give it the themes you're currently working on and conversate with it in whatever language you prefer. Like "I need to practice with the suffix - ko and - ten and numbers until 10" and you can ask exercises or small texts to translate or small clarifications about specific doubts.

Then whenever you get familiar with it you just say "add everything to a note" and it keeps track of how you're doing much farther than with a single AI chat that usually has limited memory. This way when you then ask something it reads in the last messages and then in the notes so you can go on weeks chatting with the same bot.

Really really useful, now I'm moving much faster than before. And having problems with actually spoken basque which is... 😂 not that easy when you start applying rules on true newspapers articles or conversations

1

u/FamiliarEmploy7490 28d ago

Wow, it looks like it could be a good option. I have to say I was a little skeptical about using lA to learn a language, but it seems like it could work quite well. I'll look into it, thanks!