I learned Spanish in Madrid - there's definitely no Catalan dialect of Spanish - it's either/or. And the northeastern Spanish accent is perfectly understandable (unlike, say, Galicia or Andalusia).

So it's surprising that OP thought Catalan was a version of Spanish, because it's completely unintelligible to anyone who learned Spanish as a second language (like myself) - not sure about native speakers. I can't even pronounce the street names in Barcelona when I visit.

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normie3000 3 days ago | parent [-]

> it's completely unintelligible to anyone who learned Spanish

This is wild. The languages share a lot of vocabulary and grammar.

> I can't even pronounce the street names in Barcelona when I visit.

This is also wild. I can see there are some words like "passeig" and "plaça" which aren't immediately familiar, but they're not far from the Spanish equivalents. And you could have a good shot at pronouncing many other streets like "Gran Via" and "Diagonal".

	▲	russellbeattie 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You can take a wild guess at the street names if you're reading them out loud, of course. But what do you do when someone tells you an address on a street like Passatge di'Alió ("pasa je dia lio??"). You're not remembering that on the first try, you won't write it down correctly and later when you try to tell the taxista where to go they'll look at you like you're crazy. (This is from personal experience.)