The best AI apps to practice speaking Catalan

What you need to practice speaking Catalan

Catalan is one of the easier ones. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the 62nd hardest for English speakers, at 3,019 effort points. That’s about the same as Spanish (2,941), French (2,969) or Brazilian Portuguese (3,010). And if you already speak Spanish, you’re a long way in.

So the hard part isn’t the grammar. It’s getting enough Catalan conversation, in a place where people often switch to Spanish to make things easier for you.

• Nobody lets you practiceYou say Bon dia, un cafè amb llet, si us plau, and the answer comes back in Spanish. In Barcelona almost everyone speaks both, and switching is meant kindly. But it means you rarely get to practice. A line worth learning: Podem parlar en català? Estic aprenent. Can we speak Catalan? I’m learning. Then you have to keep up, so the hours of practice need to come from somewhere.
• Vowels that shrinkIn Barcelona and Girona, an unstressed a or e turns into a short, neutral sound, like the a in “about”. So casa and pare end in the same vowel, and Barcelona sounds like “bər-sə-LO-nə”. An unstressed o becomes a u: Montserrat is “mun-sə-RAT”. Say every vowel clearly, the Spanish way, and you sound foreign straight away. (In Valencia, the vowels stay clearer.)
• En, hi, and the little words in betweenCatalan has two small words Spanish doesn’t: en and hi. Tens germans? Sí, en tinc dos: yes, I have two (of them). Hi ha: there is. And they stack: me’n vaig, I’m off, l’hi dono, I give it to him. You won’t work these out mid-sentence. You get them by hearing and saying them, many times.
• Spanish gets in the wayIf you speak Spanish, Catalan feels familiar, and that’s the trap. Cama is a leg, not a bed (that’s llit). Acostar-se is to come closer, not to go to bed. Llevar-se is to get up. And Spanish slips in without you noticing: mi germà, where Catalan says el meu germà. Those are exactly the slips you want fixed while you talk.
• Lots of Catalan you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: Catalan videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeEven one of the easier languages takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there, and in Catalan, few people will give you those minutes for free.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Catalan. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Catalan YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories written at your level. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itKnowing a word isn’t the same as using it, with the en in the right place and without a Spanish word sneaking in. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Your teacher keeps the conversation in Catalan. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to Catalan? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the basics with Parla.cat, the Catalan government’s free online course, or the Ling app. If you speak Spanish, Duolingo’s free Catalan course works too. Then come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Catalan

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, what kind of word it is, and an example with a translation. Its family and its forms are one tap away. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Catalan teachers

Three teachers, all from Catalonia: Adrià and Marc from Barcelona, and Laia from Girona. Each has their own voice. Pick the one you like.

Teachers from Catalonia

• 
  Adrià Isern

  Barcelona · Spanish
• 
  Laia Puig

  Girona · Spanish
• 
  Marc Soler

  Barcelona · Spanish

Input: Catalan to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Catalan you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Catalan YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Stories written for youRead writes Catalan texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Catalan word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people look for Catalan on Duolingo first. If you search in English, it isn’t there: Duolingo teaches Catalan only to Spanish speakers. So it’s an option if you speak Spanish. Here’s how the two compare, from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending