Welcome to my blog! You can call me Percy. I'm a 22-year-old American with a passion for everything Catalan and defending minoritized languages around the globe. I started this blog in 2015 as a place to talk about my language-learning experiences, and I hope it continues to be a resource for the community in years to come. Enjoy your stay!
Because I tend not to reblog old posts of mine and they have a tendency to get lost into the nether on here, I thought I’d make a list of all the more langblr-y posts I’ve done. Just an FYI, some of these are ancient and truly wild, but I’m still putting them because some people might find them helpful. Also I may pin this and keep updating it as I make more stuff, just because it’s easier than wading through my blog.
[ENG] I made a little zine for @zinebash’s playlist zine challenge! I’d never made one before but I’d been wanting to make a playlist of songs that I associate with this last summer - old favorites, new discoveries, and songs that hit an emotional chord <3
Individual pages and text versions below the cut, and you can listen to the playlist here!
[CAT] He fet una petita zine per al repte de @zinebash de fer una zine d'una playlist! No n'havia fet mai una zine però portava un temps volent fer una llista de cançons de l'estiu passat - vells estàndards, nous descobriments, i cançons que em van arribar al cor <3
Pàgines individuals i versió en text sota el tall, i pots escoltar la playlist aquí!
Curious about the recent Valencian music scene of the last 20 years? Don’t want to commit to anything, just want some fun music to put on in the background? Then I have the playlist for you!
People keep asking me for examples of the music that I study, so I’ve made this playlist with some greatest hits. It’s missing a lot of smaller artists, so I’m going to try to add more as I go, but if you’d like some fun ska/punk/rock/rap/pop/electronica/etc in Catalan to play in the background, you’ve come to the right place :)
I’m also going to try to make a playlist that’s a more curated history of Valencian music in Catalan, which also covers a larger period of history and a wider range of genres, but it’ll be for more intentional listening. This one is just for vibes, and hopefully you find a song or two you enjoy, or rediscover an old favorite!
This is a song by Maria Arnal & Marcel Bagés, who were a phenomenal indie-experimental(?) duo which only released two albums but all of the songs on them are incredible. This is one that I’ve been obsessed with lately. The title is “Meteorit ferit” which translates to “wounded meteorite”, and the lyrics and arrangement are very fun.
Com un meteorit lluminós
Like a luminous meteorite
creuo el cel, desbocada,
I cross the sky, unbridled
capa a capa va cremant
Layer by layer burning
tota la meva cuirassa
All my armor
Com ganivets esmolats
Like sharpened knives
com la més àgil espasa
Like the most agile sword
capa a capa va cremant
Layer by layer burning
tota la meva cuirassa
All my armor
Com ganivets esmolats
Like sharpened knives
com la més àgil espasa
Like the most agile sword
capa a capa va cremant
Layer by layer burning
tota la meva cuirassa
All my armor
Al cel sóc estela de llum
In the sky I’m a trailing wake of light
espant metàl·lic que fulgura
A metallic scare which flashes
cada vegada més avall, ai,
Every time further below, oh
i no sé com demanar ajuda
And I don’t know how to ask for help
Ara tan tova i abans tan dura
Now so soft and before so hard
perdo la meva armadura
I lose my armor
i l’abraço tan fort com puc
And I hug it as hard as I can
com si fos la teva cintura
As though it were your waist
Peça a peça, pètals vençuts
Piece by piece, defeated petals
un per cada veritat absoluta
One for each absolute truth
un per cada certesa total
One for each total certainty
cap que freni la clara caiguda
None that can stop the obvious fall
Cada capa de l’atmosfera
Every layer of the atmosphere
em va deixant més i més nua
Is leaving me more and more naked
i potser vaig més lleugera
And maybe I’m moving a bit lighter
però la pena es tan severa
But the pain is so severe
Cada capa de l’atmosfera
Every layer of the atmosphere
em va deixant més i més nua
Is leaving me more and more naked
i potser vaig més lleugera
And maybe I’m moving a bit lighter
però la pena es tan severa
But the pain is so severe
que l’arrossego com una cua
That I drag it along like a tail
Busco una ombra d’esperança
I’m looking for a shadow of hope
vull un canvi de partitura
I want a change of tune
vull cantar una aliança
I want to sing an alliance
vull canviar la llei futura
I want to change the future law
Ara tan tendra i abans tan dura
Now so tender and before so hard
perdo la meva armadura
I lose my armor
i l’abraço tan fort com puc
And I hug it as hard as I can
com si fos la teva cintura
As though it were your waist
Aquest any, 2025, assoleixo una fita molt gran - porto 10 anys aprenent el català!
Tot i que no és la llengua que més temps he estudiat, és la llengua que més m'ha canviat la vida. No podria imaginar que una curiositat pel país darrere un equip de futbol (sí, va ser pel Barça que vaig començar a aprendre el català 🫣) em portaria a tantes amistats, tanta comunitat increïble, tanta cultura (ja que sigui llibres, sèries, pel·lícules, i sobretot música), i fins i tot un doctorat. No puc imaginar qui seria sense aquests 10 anys - no seria la mateixa persona, ni de bon tros.
Estic obligadíssim a agrair tots els catalans que he conegut al llarg d'aquests anys, ja fossin professoris, amiguis a la vida real o a Tumblr, gent que feien intercanvis lingüístics, etc - tothom m'ha acollit i m'ha fet sentir com a casa de seguida, i crec que la força del català rau en la quantitat de gent tan bonica que el parla. Gràcies per la paciència, per la disposició a parlar amb mi i contestar les meves preguntes, i per ser tan amable i tan acollidora <3
Per celebrar, com que la majoria de la música que escolto (i que he escoltat, realment, des que vaig començar a aprendre el català) és en català, he fet una playlist de totes les cançons que m'han acompanyat al llarg d'aquest viatge. Algunes són més conegudes que altres, algunes m'han sigut més importants i algunes més, i la barreja acaba semblant una mica random, però també volia celebrar amb la banda sonora d'aquest temps, perquè és el que més destaca per a mi. Spotify no em diu quant dura, només que són més de 24 hores de música, així que en teniu de sobres si voleu més música en català!
Gràcies a tothom que ha estat aquí des del principi, i a tothom que s'hi ha unit després! Espero que us apunteu a la festa, i per molts anys més :D
Heus aquí la llista:
Una cançó de fa ara més de 10 anys, però que m'ha sortit a l'atzar i que m'ha parlat al cor. / A song from now more than 10 years ago, but which showed up randomly for me and spoke to me, so I’ve translated it here.
Sento cantar les granotes des del meu llit
I hear the frogs singing from my bed
Anuncien la pluja que ha de venir
They’re announcing the rain which must be coming
I els seus cants omplen la nit de veritats
And their songs fill the night with truths
De certeses mil·lenàries i ancestrals
Of thousand-year-old, ancestral certainties
No són promeses buides, invisibles
They’re not empty, invisible promises
[ TORNADA:
No, no et diré que anirà bé
No, I won’t tell you that it’ll be okay
Perquè és el que diu la gent
Because that’s what people say
Quan no et vol ajudar
When they don’t want to help you
Jo et diré mirant-te als ulls
I’ll tell you, looking you in the eyes
Que si no surt com has pensat
That if it doesn’t go the way you thought
Em tindràs al teu costat
You’ll have me by your side ]
No t'espolsis la gent amb paraules amables
Don’t brush people off with kind words
No defugis problemes culpant als altres
Don’t run away from problems by blaming others
Ni la natura és sàvia ni la gent bona perquè sí
Natural instinct isn’t wisdom, nor are people good just because
Però si ens tenim a prop potser trobarem un camí
But if we have each other close by maybe we can find a way
Sense optimismes fàcils però amb valentia
Without easy positivity, but with bravery
[ TORNADA ]
Tinc una relació molt normal amb Quan el mal ve d'Almansa… podeu fiar-vos de mi sóc súper normal en la presència d'aquest àlbum
എനിക്ക് മലയാളത്തിൽ സംസരിക്കാൻ സാധിക്കുന്നില്ല പക്ഷെ ഇ വർഷം മലയാളം പഠിച്ചു എന്നാൽ കൊറിച്ച് കൊറിച്ച് പറയാം! വളരെ സന്തോഷം ഉണ്ട്. അടുത്ത് വർഷം കൂടുതൽ പഠിക്കാം.
This is the opposite of people making fake Cyrillic and Greek and such that’s supposed to be read as its Latin equivalents. My brain really wants to find Latin letters here but it is definitely actually Tamil
As I said in my last post, I’m slowly getting better at figuring out how to set goals which both push me out of my comfort zone and which actually orient me towards what I’m trying to do. This year my main goal is to just remember how to be a learner again; I feel like recently I’ve gotten a little too in-my-head about how I need to be perfect before I speak, and actually this tends to be a problem I have in general - I won’t talk to people unless I feel like I can talk perfectly, but that’s not how you learn. I’m also trying to get better at setting reasonable timelines for what it takes to get to a particular level of language, which I have a better feel for at this point, and taking into account how much time I’m spending on the language every day (it shouldn’t feel overwhelming if it’s supposed to be a brief warmup). With these in mind, here are my goals for the year:
CATALAN
This year, I really want to speak Catalan with more people. That’s the bottom line. I’m at a level where I need to be doing language immersion, and that means not being shy about not knowing how to say things or starting off the conversation wrong or any number of things (this historically has been less of a problem for Catalan with me, but for some reason I was absolutely taken out last summer and essentially went partially mute from social anxiety, so we’re going to find out what was up with that and try to coax me away from it). I also want to learn to speak the Valencian dialect of Catalan better, and hopefully I’ll get the chance to do that!
I’m planning to continue my reading challenge as well, but I’m going to make a separate post about that.
BASQUE
I want to improve my Basque vocabulary, and also my listening comprehension skills. I want to finish Eskamak kentzen and also watch/listen to more things in Basque. I think I just need a whole bunch of audio input - I know a lot of the words, but it’s still very hard for me to parse them in speech. In order to improve my vocabulary, I want to do a quick vocab review every day when I get to the library, before I start my work. That way, I’ll have a constant, easy, long-term exposure to a wider variety of words, and hopefully after a few months I’ll start remembering some!
WELSH
I’m not entirely sure what I want to do with Welsh this year - I feel a bit directionless with it, so I might put it on pause until it feels like the right time to take it up again. But I’d also like to get more listening and vocabulary practice - I can understand large portions song lyrics without looking them up, which is a huge step forward for me. If watching Rownd a Rownd seems like the vibe, I might try to take that up again. We’ll see, this one is more open.
MALAYALAM
Mostly, my goal with Malayalam is just to keep taking class, but also I’d really like to get over my fear of speaking. I struggle to pronounce a lot of the letters, and I don’t know a lot of words, but if I work on these, I think I’d feel more confident. (I do also just need to feel okay with looking like a fool, though.) By the end of the year, I hope I’m able to have conversations in class or with my family without wavering too much, even if I forget something or mess up the pronunciation.
OTHER LANGUAGES
One main thing I want to work on is learning how to learn a small amount of a language but still being able to use it with people. There are a few different languages which I’ve wanted to learn for a while but haven’t had the time - I’m hoping that maybe I can work up the courage to learn a few phrases, talk to someone, and perhaps learn a thing or two. This is very open-ended, but it’s more a challenge for me to expand my comfort zone.
Aaaand that’s a wrap! Here’s to 2025 being a good year for languages, at least!
guillemelgat
Another year, another set of goals! This year, in the actual spirit of my very reasonable 2022 language goals, here are my plans for language study.
First and foremost, my goal is to find Catalan friends in my new hometown, because I really need to speak Catalan with people at minimum once a week or I get very sad, and currently I’m not speaking it with anyone at all. This goal is pretty chill though—I just have to actually sit down and put in the time to find people.
My main goal is to read 30 books in Catalan. I’ll make a proper post about it with a list of books that I’m thinking of and how the challenge itself is going to work, but overall I’m trying to pick a mix of styles and genres, so expect anything from medieval literature to YA novels to academic texts. I have a lot of books that I’ve been meaning to read for a while, so hopefully this will give me a chance to chip into some of them. 30 books is less than other versions of this challenge that I’ve seen, but it’s also many more books than I’ve read in Catalan possibly ever and I think it’s more reasonable in conjunction with a full class load. Hopefully it ends up being just the right amount!
This year I really want to work hard to actually get these two to an upper intermediate level, because I’m so close if I put in the work. For both of them, I have two main goals: (1) go through the textbooks/workbooks that I started going through casually last semester (Basic Welsh: A Grammar and Workbook by Gareth King and Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar by Rudolf P.G. de Rijk) so that I can continue to review and learn new grammatical structures, and (2) watch one episode of a TV series each week in each language. For the TV series, I’m going to be watching Rownd a Rownd on S4C (which is available outside Wales/the UK! Huge win!) and Eskamak kentzen on EITB. If I have time, I’ll try to go through episodes more thoroughly and note down new vocabulary and such, but the main goal is to make a routine of it and watch consistently so I’m trying to keep it simple. I’d also like to use both languages with other people more often if I can, but I think finding a consistent language partner will perhaps be a goal for another year.
I’m planning to focus the first half of the year on Welsh and Basque, and then next fall, I’m hoping to be able to take the Malayalam classes offered by my university and to get into studying my home dialect (or rather, my extended family’s home dialect, since I didn’t speak it at home) as well. Since this will be later and also classroom learning rather than self-study, I’m not going to go into details, but overall, after my trip to Kerala (which I have stuff about, it’s on the docket!), I’m generally feeling much less alienated and much more motivated to study the language. I’m also looking forward to being able to take real classes, which I think will help keep me focused and on track.
This is a minor goal, but at my friend’s house over the summer, her mom was joking that if they just spoke to me in Russian while I stayed at their house, I’d probably be able to understand it by the end. That led us to concoct a plan where I study a bit of Russian vocab, then go there and do intensive Russian immersion for a weekend or so. This is more of a silly goal, but I’d like to try it because I think it could be fun.
This isn’t a language goal per se, but rather a general resolution to spend this year learning to use (and tweaking and configuring) Anki. Anki has a notoriously high barrier to entry, and from everything I’ve seen it should be treated as a long-term, intensive project—I’ll hopefully reap the rewards later if I take my time and set up everything right in the early stages. With that in mind, I’m hoping that by the end of the year I’ve figure out a set up for my decks and cards that really works for getting me to remember and be able to use vocab and grammar. I’ll focus on the languages here for the start, but I’m hoping that with habit and time, if I get a good system going I can use it with other languages too.
And that’s it! It’s been a bit since I was systematic about studying languages, but I’ve found that I really miss it and want to go back. I feel like I’m at a really good place with all of these, and I’d like to continue to make progress, so I’m really trying to focus on consistency and hitting the sweet spot of just challenging enough to get myself out of my comfort zone while not burning out. Hopefully I’ve set this up in a way to build habits and make me excited to keep immersing myself with these languages in the coming years, which is really the key to learning any language in the long term—I've realized that I speak Catalan so well because it's fully integrated into my life, and I'd like all these others to be as well. Here’s to a good 2024, and I wish all of you luck with your own goals as well!
guillemelgat
I’m only a month late but here’s the yearly review! These goals were actually quite reasonable, and though I didn’t hit most of them, they were good guides to have.
For Catalan, I did manage to find a Catalan speaker in this city (WILD story but we don’t have time for that), who confirmed my suspicions that there just are no Catalans here by the fact that they know exactly two other Catalans. But I also might have an in on two professors who might be Catalan, and could also talk to, which would be exciting. Meanwhile my Catalan is quickly atrophying, but I did at least find people, which I’m very happy about. In terms of reading, I had a feeling I would read way less than 30 books, and I was right about that: I read 7 (I would have read way more if I was capable of finishing a book; alas, that skill is escaping me at this moment). But I still think that the challenge was absolutely worth it, and I’d like to do it next year, too. I’ll write up a longer post about that, though.
In terms of Welsh and Basque, I wouldn’t say that I followed these goals at all. But for both of them, I think I did put in a lot more effort and kind of got a reality check on how I should go about studying them. For Welsh, I started listening to a whole bunch more music. For Basque, I got to go to the Basque Country for a weekend and stay with a friend and speak in Basque the whole time, which was a huge challenge, but also really made me understand what I need to work on (comprehension/vocabulary/more advanced grammar). I didn’t end up watching much Rownd a Rownd or Eskamak kentzen, but I think that I’ve had a lot of problems with attention span (and also realistic expectations) this year, and I’m slowly starting to figure out how to create a language routine that works with what I’ve got.
For Malayalam, I did start taking classes, and this is one of the few goals that has really worked out. Malayalam has gone from being something really frustrating and emotionally taxing for me to a language I feel like I’m starting to have a grasp on. The class has been very intensive (we learned the alphabet and all the noun cases in the first semester, and were reading simple texts by the end), but it’s been good for pushing my limits. Unfortunately the time is a little rough, especially with a full class load and TAship, but it’s so rewarding that I think I’m going to stick through this semester as well.
Alas, I didn’t get to try Russian immersion. I still think this would be really funny, though.
As for Anki, I tried pretty hard at the beginning of last year to get into it, but unfortunately it takes so much time to make your own cards (if you’re silly like me - I could probably put them together in a less complicated way) and eventually I just decided to stick with Memrise for now. We’ll see, though. Maybe I can simplify my template or something - I just need a quicker way to set up large amounts of cards.
This year was a long and very heavy year for me personally, but also a very meaningful year in some ways, and I think it taught me to think much more about what matters to me, and to clear away what doesn’t. I’ve been studying all four of these languages for a significant amount of time now, and I want them to continue be a part of my life and my world. Hopefully 2025 will be yet another year in which I continue to grow into them, and them into me.
