When it comes to Catalan and books, Teach Yourself Catalan is pretty much it. You can choose between the new edition with 2 CDs and a used copy of the 1993 edition. The word on the review street seemed to be that the newer version was more conversational, perhaps dumbed down, and the older one was more linguistic and technical but also more complete.

The CDs and apparent lack of other options for hearing the language spoken put me on the fence for a while, but I eventually went with the old edition, and was happy with that choice. The explanations were clear, the vocabulary extensive, and it uses the International Phonetic Alphabet, which might be a stumbling block for anyone who has never taken a linguistics class, but is hands down the most universal and objective system for accurately specifying pronunciation.

IPA or no, it's still pretty important to hear the language spoken by a native in order to get the rhythm right and work out the inevitable kinks and misconceptions you develop when you have no one to correct you. At one point I tried searching IMDb for movies in Catalan and then seeing which ones Netflix had. It was difficult to tell how much Catalan any of them contained because Netflix listed them all as being in Spanish, and IMDb often indicated both Spanish and Catalan. I got about 5 movies, but the only one I ended up watching was the wacky Teté and the Moon, directed by the prolific Bigas Luna. It was reasonably entertaining but not very edifying; the language sounded like Spanish to me.

Fortunately I ended up finding several web sites that were quite helpful in my endeavor. This page, part of a language site called Orbis Latinus, has a primitive design but a surprisingly thorough linguistic overview of the language and descriptive grammar, including extensive notes on pronunciation.

This wiki page is a brief summary of pronunciation, but it solved the mystery of how to pronounce final ch, as in the name of the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch.

From the University of Barcelona comes an unbelievably extensive audio phrase book intended for students. There must be well over a thousand words and phrases here. The only trouble is the use of real audio files, but it's well worth it.

Catradió.cat, a web radio site with plenty of shows available. I only listened to it a handful of times, but it was helpful.

Moving out of pronunciation specifically, DACCO is a pretty good Catalan-English dictionary. LEARNING CATALAN ON THE INTERNET is incomplete as a web textbook, but has a good list of resources from which many of these were drawn. El Periódico de Catalunya and AVUI+ are good newspapers to read. Baixa Gastronomia is a food blog in Catalan, with a bunch of links to other blogs in the language.

As I indicated in a previous post, even for those reluctant to learn this language, I think it's well worth getting the pronunciation down if you are traveling to Catalonia.