Here's the happy news: any learner can learn Aranese almost as if it were a separate language, and not a dialect in a greater language whole. You can ignore, if you wish, everything about Occitan and save yourself a lot of head and heartache!
I still think you could treat Aranese 'as if' it were an independent language. And I think that's the best way for a beginner wanting to find their feet, to pick an Occitan dialect and stick to it.
I read somewhere a criticisms made by an Occitanist linguist that most Occitanist linguistics of the 20th century have focused exclusively on dialectology and not enough on other aspects like sociolinguistics. If there's gristle for the dialectologist's mill, it's because Occitan is indeed rich and diverse. Why limit yourself to just one?
From a purely practical perspective, the more dialects you are familiar with
at least passively, the more stuff you can access, and the more dialects you're exposed to, the bigger your potential speaker base becomes as well. For a language that is minoritised to the extent that Occitan is, the desire to speak to as many speakers as possible, or more likely, to write with/read/listen to as many speakers as possible is a powerful motivator. Of course there's also good old curiosity. Occitan covers three nation states, several civilisations and many ways of life. Why wouldn't you be interested in the full spectrum of human life and the people who speak them?
And even if you were only interested in the Val d'Aran, it doesn't make sense to treat Aranese as if it were an isolated variety when almost all of what makes Aranese Aranese is shared with the dialects across the border in the Coserans and Comenge, or can be found in other Occitan varieties further afield.
For example Aranese for many of its words has the typical Catalan/Spanish accentuation where the accent falls on the antepenultimate syllable (this is due to Catalan/Spanish interference).
So in Aranese, you say:
Música and not musica [my'zika]
Atlàntica and not atlantica [allan'tika]
Física and not fisica [fi'zika]
Política and not politica [puli'tika]
But interestingly enough, this accentuation system was independently developed and is much more extensive in Nissart on the other side of the Occitan speaking world. And they're justly very proud of their distinctive accentuation.
In the following map you can see the different kinds of third person masculine direct object clitics in different Aranese dialects. In the towns of Bausen and Canejan, they use the exact same forms -u as just across the border.
But do you have to know that to learn Aranese? Not at all. But knowing what's happening in other Occitan dialects, using them as a point of comparisons can reduce the Spanish/Catalan influence as much as possible. So I
consciously use the second set of accentuation, common to most Occitan dialects, although I know that many young Aranese native speakers don't pronounce it like that.
Not it's not necessary. But it's damn
interesting to know. Why deprive yourself of that when you could get one Occitan dialect and with a bit of effort (understatement!), all of the other Occitan dialects too?
So what I say now may seem contradictory to what I said before in my original quote, where I said that Occitan was too big to learn as a whole (implying that this complexity was a disadvantage) and you should stick to one dialect.
Eventually, I hope the hypothetical Occitan learner comes to appreciate the extraordinary opportunity that the language gives them. I honestly believe that the more dialectical variety a language has, the luckier the language learner is.
Well, many people think the dialectical situation is not
lucky for the language per se, but I think the miserable situation of Occitan cannot be really blamed on its dialectical variety. It mostly has to do with the linguicidal policies of three states.
Only a couple of traits of Aranese are truly unique to Aranese. Young speakers tends to privilege some things that are extraordinary. The current collapse in Aranese of the èster/auer auxiliary distinction for some kinds of verbs in the construction of the perfect tense, would surprise any speaker of Occitan. In Aranese auer comes to take most of the auxiliary role of èster:
Es gojates son anades -> es gojates an anat.
Se son visti -> s'an vist
Es dus aranesi se son maridadi - es dus aranesi s'an maridat
It's probable that this change was originally an interference from Catalan however and not a genuine evolution of Aranese, as this distinction is still maintained in some Aranese dialects (for the oldest speakers).
A lot of what makes Aranese different is due to the pressure of Spanish/Catalan (but mostly Spanish) on the minoritised language. And conversely, the influence of French on the Gascon dialects in the French state is just as notable to Aranese speakers, and the same can be said for the Occitan spoken in Italy. In other words, Occitan is being torn apart three way like so much putty at the hands of the dominating three languages.
The last week I've been studying Aranese, through reading and listening to the radio as well as writing comments in Aranese on social media. I'm also reading stories from a variety of non-Aranese Gascon dialects. Here's something I'm learning from that...there's a crazy amount of diversity within Gascon alone! If that's the case for Gascon, then imagine Auvernhat, Vivaro-Alpine, Provençal, Limosin...