LingoflyA a
«a» is a vowel of the Catalan script, read as “ah; unstressed — a muffled "uh"”. A clean "ah" under stress. Unstressed it collapses into a short neutral sound, like the a in English "about". For example, in the word “aigua” — water. The Catalan alphabet has 27 letters in total, and this character can be played right here. Vowel reduction is not an accent but the norm: casa sounds like "KAH-zuh". It appears, for example, in the word “hola” — hello.
In short
| Character | A a |
| Sound | ah; unstressed — a muffled "uh" |
| What it is | a vowel |
In our course the character comes 1st of 35: the order here is not alphabetical but from familiar to unfamiliar, after it comes b, appears in roughly every other word on this site.
How it sounds
A clean "ah" under stress. Unstressed it collapses into a short neutral sound, like the a in English "about"
The character in a word
A lone character is hard to remember: memory holds on to meaning, and a letter has none. The word it stands in provides that anchor.
- aiguawater
The character in the “five vowels — eight sounds” group
The main difficulty of Catalan is not the letters. Unstressed vowels lose themselves: a and e merge into one muffled sound, o turns into u. This is the norm, and it is how you recognize a native speaker.
Words with this character
How to remember this character
A single letter is the hardest thing to remember: memory has nothing to hold on to — a character has no meaning. A three-step loop works: see the character, try to recall the sound (for «a» it is “ah; unstressed — a muffled "uh"”, as in the word “aigua”), see the right answer.
And come back to it the next day, not in an hour: a check a day or two later beats a check the same day. Nobody holds the whole alphabet — 27 letters — at once.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
Frequently asked
How does the Catalan character a read?
As “ah; unstressed — a muffled "uh"” — it is a vowel of the Catalan script. A clean "ah" under stress. Unstressed it collapses into a short neutral sound, like the a in English "about". For example, in the word “aigua” — water.