[jknightco]

Well that's just patently untrue. Catalan and Spanish are as different as Spanish and French, German and Dutch, or Norwegian and Swedish. The two are further apart, lexically, than Catalan and French. They use very different perifrastic tenses, the main one would confuse the hell out of an unaware Spanish speaker (conjugate "to go" + unconjugated verb == simple past in Spanish, e.g. "vaig naixer" == "nací" == "i was born"). Not to mention spelling and pronunciation rules are drastically different ("vaig" is pronounced "vatch").