El Foraster

I have started doing a self-paced online introductory Catalan course through the folks at Easy Catalan. In the unit on personal pronouns they recommended looking at the Catalan television series El Foraster (The Outsider) because the presenter, Quim Masferrer, often uses the formal version of the second person singular pronoun, vós, when interviewing older people. Taking their hint, I’ve discovered this to be a quite engaging and enjoyable television show, even though I don’t know very much of the language.

The premise of El Foraster is that the host Quim travels around to the tiniest villages of Catalunya, spends 48 hours interviewing some of the inhabitants, and then afterwards shares his interviews in a monologue given to a group of the villagers. The show is edited so that it intercuts the interviews with video of the monologue to the group, the camera often zooming in on the reaction of the interviewee sitting in the group. Quim is warm-hearted and quite funny; he often concludes his monologue with saying to the villagers “… sou molt bona gent.” (you are very good people).

It’s a pleasure to see the countryside of Catalunya that is highlighted in the series. And it’s a good language learning experience. I watch it with subtitles in Catalan turned on, which helps considerably with comprehension and picking up on pronunciation. Because Quim is always meeting new people, the dialogue patterns will repeat, which is good for learning.