What is it like to learn Catalan?

“Objectively speaking, there aren’t any languages that are more difficult than others,” says Afra Pujol i Campeny, who teaches Catalan at the University of Cambridge. “When we have a baby learning a mother tongue, the baby doesn’t have more difficulty with language A or language B.”

But what about learning a language as an adult? Picking up a foreign language past early childhood is no easy feat, especially when there are so many other factors — resources, exposure, or time at one’s disposal, for example — at play. 

Take Catalan: despite being spoken by over 9 million people and understood by 11 million — more than other official EU languages such as Bulgarian, Danish, or Slovak — people sometimes put off learning it when they move to Catalonia, often due to its closeness to Spanish and other Romance languages or its perceived “utility” compared to other more widely spoken languages abroad.