hiya! I saw the post about the Catalan for Beginners course offered by the Pompeu Fabra University. I read that the 4th edition of the course is from 15 June to 17 July. does that mean that the course is in-progress and registration is already over? kinda feel like it is but I wanted to double-check. thank you!
Hi! First of all, thank you so much for your interest for our language! :D
I'm not affiliated with that university so my knowledge on this is limited.
Looking at the website, I'm already seeing the dates for the 2026-2027, so I assume the present one must be closed?
However, when I first recommended it I messaged some people who said they were taking the course to ask about it (they were all satisfied with it and recommend it to others btw!). They said that it's a self-paced course, where access to new materials opens every week and there are discussion forums for students to post their short texts and answer each other to practice what they're doing that week, but that there's no problem if you're late because the previous weeks are still fully available. For this reason, registration time is also open until some days after the day the course starts. After the 3-4 weeks of the course, all the material also stays open for an extra 2 weeks in case someone hadn't had time to finish. So, in future occasions, if someone is just slightly late, it should still be fine!
For anyone seeing this post who might be interested and don't know what we're talking about, the UPF university from Barcelona (Catalonia's capital city) offers free online courses to start learning Catalan. The course is in English and everyone can sign up. So far, they have two courses. One is for absolute beginners (A1.1 level, linked here) and the other one is the follow up (A1.2 level, linked here).
Meanwhile, if someone already has some (very basic) amount of understanding (for example, if you already speak another Romance language), there is also a TV programme for learners that you can watch for free on Catalonia's TV channel online streaming platform 3cat. The show is called Català Fàcil and it has three seasons, starting with the most basic things. It is made for people who moved to Catalonia with no prior knowledge of the language, so it's made to be very easy to understand. You can also activate subtitles in Catalan, though the main words are always written on the screen anyway. Here's the link.
