Cooljugator: The Smart Conjugator in Catalan

This is a very simple Catalan verb conjugator. There are many Catalan conjugators online, but, with this one, our goal is to make Catalan conjugation easy, smart and straightforward.

You can input verbs into the Cooljugator bar above in any form, tense or mood in both Catalan and English. The Catalan Cooljugator can currently conjugate around 1566 verbs. We suggest you try it out.

You can also click here to browse the list of Catalan verbs that we can conjugate.

Common Catalan verbs

If you run out of ideas, some common Catalan verbs:

The Catalan language

Catalan is a Romance language spoken by close to 10 million people in Catalonia (where over 35% of people use it as the main daily language), some parts of Italy, Spain, the micro-state Andorra and other places. Interestingly, Catalan is arguably more similar to Gallo-Romance languages than Ibero-Romance ones (such as Spanish or Portuguese). There is one Gallo-Romance language in particular that Catalan is considered to be quite close to: Occitan. Occitan is spoken in southern France and it has much in common with Catalan in terms of its vocabulary, grammar, and even the way it is spoken. However, such comparisons of similarity are indeed hard to make, because Catalan itself is split into multiple dialects. Different sources identify Eastern and Western groups of Catalan dialects. Those dialects range from Valencian (spoken in the city of Valencia, and even considered as an independent language rather than a dialect of Catalan by some Valencians) to Alguerese (from Alghero in Sardinia).

Catalan evolved from Vulgar Latin in the region of the eastern Pyrenees in around the ninth - tenth centuries. It was used quite extensively in the Middle Ages by the Crown of Aragon (a primarily maritime kingdom controlled by one king and many smaller kingdoms, which existed around the territory of the present Catalonia, as well as large parts of Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta and others, but which eventually in 1469 entered into a familial union with the Crown of Castile, which would later become the Kingdom o Spain under Philip II). Ever since 1469, however, the language started its descent. In 1659 Spain lost Northern Catalonia to France, which eventually led to Catalan being banned in the early 18th century. As emerging Catalan nationalism caused a revival of the language in the nineteenth century (which was part of a wider cultural revival called 'la Renaixença'), which even lead to the 1913 orthographic standardisation of Catalan. The language was gaining ground and even achieved an official status at the time of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39). However, the Franco's dictatorship (1939–75) banned Catalan again (the ban spanned from 1940 to 1978), setting the language further back until the fall of the dictatorship.

Despite Catalan being spoken largely in the current territory of Spain, it is quite frequently said that Catalan shares more similarities with French (or even Italian) than Spanish (examples like the Catalan word for 'morning', i.e. 'matí' are given - compare with French 'matin' and Spanish 'mañana'). Interestingly, Catalan was much less influenced by the Arabic language than Spanish was due to the Moorish conquest: many Spanish words currently start with 'al', because they are of Arabic origin, where 'al' is the definite article - but the same is not true for Catalan. Compare Spanish and Catalan: 'algodón' - 'cotó' (English 'cotton'), 'aciete' - 'oli' (English 'oil'), 'azúcar' - 'sucre' (English 'sugar'), etc.

Catalan is written in the Latin alphabet, but it has a number of its own diacritic marks, such as áorüor letterç (which French also has).

About Catalan conjugation

Catalan conjugation is a procedure in which Catalan verbs are changed to match with various other features of the phrase and its context. In Catalan, you usually have to have a couple of basic forms of the verb to work out its other forms.

In Catalan, you can conjugate verbs by these major factors:

  • person - the verb changes depending on the person it is referring to, e.g. 'jo faig' - 'I do', or 'ell/ella fa' - 'he/she does'
  • number - changes based on whether we are talking about a single person like in 'ell/ella fa' - 'he/she fa', or many: 'ells/elles fan' - 'they do'
  • aspect - perfective, progressive, imperfective, which all connect the verb to the flow of time, that is, they indicate whether an action is occuring at the time, used to occur frequently, or occurred generally; for example, 'jo feia' means 'I was doing' (an imperfective aspect), whereas 'jo he fet' ('I have done') is the perfective aspect
  • voice - active and passive: the difference between 'something is doing' and 'something is being done'
  • tense - Catalan has a rich tense system, having present, preterite (past), imperfect (denoting actions that occurred continuously in the past), future tenses; moreover, Catalan also has a very interesting periphrastic aspect, which, appeared around the 13th century and is used more than the normal past preterite tense
  • mood - which indicates the attitude of the speaker, and is distinguished as indicative, conditional or imperative, e.g. ' fas' - 'you do', 'faries' - 'you would do' and 'fes' - 'do!').

In the Catalan Cooljugator, as usually in Cooljugators, we try to provide you as much information about the verb as possible, although we also try to focus on the most important aspects of Catalan conjugation. We hope that this conjugation information, next to the abundant examples we provide, will help you become a better Spanish speaker, or just learn more about the language, or both.

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