The sound system of Catalan shares many features with that of Spanish, but there are many differences:

Vowels
Catalan has 5 vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning: i, e, a, u, o. The pronunciation of /e/, /a/, and /o/ depends on whether they are stressed or unstressed; the pronunciation of /i/ and /u/ is not significantly dependent on stress.

Consonants
The 23-consonant inventory of Catalan is very similar to that of Spanish.

Voiced stops, fricatives, and affricates are devoiced in final position;
b, v are both pronounced as a voiced bilabial fricative [ß] between vowels or liquids;
d is pronounced as a voiced dental fricative [ð] between vowels or liquids;
g is pronounced as a voiced velar fricative [γ] between vowels or liquids;
l is pronounced more like the [l] in English ball;
r is pronounced as an alveolar trill at the beginning of words and between vowels, elsewhere as an alveolar flap.

Stress
Stress normally falls on the penultimate syllable, if the word ends in a vowel, vowel + s, or -en, otherwise if falls on the final syllable.

Click here for a more detailed description of Catalan phonology.
Click here to listen to some simple phrases in Catalan.

The grammar of Catalan is similar to the grammar of Spanish.

Nouns
Nouns are marked for gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural). They are not inflected for case. Articles and adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in gender and number, e.g., el meu pare "my father" (masculine singular), la meva mare "my mother" (feminine singular), un gat "a male cat," una gata "a female cat."
Click here to learn more about Catalan nouns.

Pronouns
As in Spanish, the pronominal system of Catalan is quite complicated. Below are a few of its features:

Subject pronouns can be dropped, e.g., Jo t’estimo or T’estimo "(I) love you."
Post-verbal pronouns have several forms such as:

The rules for combining pronouns are complicated, as they are in Spanish and Italian, e.g., Dòna-l’hi. (li + el = l'hi) "Give it to him."
Catalan makes a distinction between informal and formal second person pronouns tu (informal you) and Vostè (formal you), much like Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.
Click here to learn more about Catalan pronouns.

Verbs
Catalan verbs are characterized by the following features:

three regular conjugations and some 150 irregular verbs;
four simple tenses: present, past, imperfect, and future;
compound tenses are formed with the auxiliary verb haver "to have" + the past passive participle;
five moods: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, potential (conditional), and infinitive;
two voices: active and passive which is formed with the auxiliary esser " to be" + the past passive participle.
reflexive verbs are similar to those in Spanish, e.g., Em rento "I wash myself," M'he rentat "I have washed myself," Renta't! "Wash yourself!"
Click here to learn more about Catalan verbs.
Click here for a brief tutorial on Catalan verbs.

Catalan shares most of its vocabulary with other Romance languages. Ethnologue estimates that Central Catalan has 87% lexical similarity with Italian, 85% with Portuguese and Spanish, 76% with Rhaeto-Romance, 75% with Sardinian, 73% with Rumanian.

Below are a few common Catalan phrases and words.

Below are the numbers 1-10 in Catalan. They are quite similar to their counterparts in other Romance languages.