Deck updated 15 March 2025. Enhancements included corrections, refined English translations, removal of rare words and addition of common words. Deck updated 1 January 2025. Enhancements include refined English translations.
A resource for English-speaking learners of Catalan who want to learn large volumes of vocabulary. This deck contains is drawn from a study the words that are known to all Catalan people, according to an online megastudy of vocabulary size that involved over 200,000 native Catalan speakers. For this reason it is more culturally attuned than regular vocabulary lists, including common dishes and festivities that are a common part of Catalan life. The English translations selected are designed to enable the learner to differentiate between Catalan words that are synonyms or have overlapping meanings. The deck was created by Ada Oliveras, a qualified and experienced translator and native Catalan speaker, and Siobhan Tebbs, a native English-speaking advanced learner of Catalan. Both have long experience in designing learning experiences as part of Oliva Creative, a learning design agency. This deck are offered as a free resource for Catalan learners. We recommend that you complement flashcard learning with a wide variety of other learning methods. To embed the vocabulary into your mind it can be useful to try and make use of the new words you learn soon after learning them, by writing stories or having conversations. Reading books and newspapers can help you to see the vocabulary in action and understand how it is truly used lexically. We will be creating future iterations of the deck, as well as subsequent decks with additional words, based on the ratings of Catalan speakers in the same study. Happy learning!
Guasch, M., Boada, R., Duñabeitia, J.A. et al. Prevalence norms for 40,777 Catalan words: An online megastudy of vocabulary size. Behavoural Research 55, 3198–3217 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01959-5