Catalan For Beginners

The no-fact-checking edition

Catalan is Castilian (Spanish) + French + Italian in a blender.

The first words learned were those I saw everywhere: Sortida (exit) was easy, like the French Sortie.  Amb (with) was jarring because I couldn't connect it to any other language, but the omnipresent Rosetta Signs confirmed it.  Quatre (four) is straight French to the eyes but kwatrah to the ears.  The letter X plays more of a role than usual, where Castilian uses ch: xocolata amb xurros.  T can be silent: Batlló is pronounced close to Bayou.  C can have a descender, like French and Portuguese: plaça.  Ll is common, and it's perfectly fine at the beginnings and ends of words.  Buy some llibres at the llibreria, after a trip to Park Güell!  There's also a separated version, with punctuation apparently used to indicate that it's really just 2 Ls, not the y or j that ll usually makes.  The mark used can be a period (Avenida Paral.lel), a dash (col-lectió) or a mid-height dot (my favorite, the Il·lusions store).  I've never seen this in a language before.  Exciting!