Harry Potter aka 哈利波特

Sometime last year, I got it in my head that I would like to read Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone in Chinese. It was a favourite book of mine in childhood and it felt like the perfect first "real" novel for me to read in Chinese. I know the story very well, so I figured I'd be able to follow along fairly easily but still learn a lot of new vocab. My mom found me a copy translated to Traditional Chinese in Hong Kong and brought it for me during her recent visit.

When I first flipped through the pages, it felt like an impossible task. It was my first Chinese book where the pages flipped left to right and the text read from top to bottom, right to left. If that was too hard to follow, see photo below.

In April, I finally got the nerve to start reading. It was slow. Slower than slow. Painfully slow. I also realized that this was a terrible book for beginner readers because there are a ton of names as well as totally made up words (i.e. muggles). These words are "transliterated" or are "loan-words" meaning Chinese characters that sort of make the right sound for a word like "muggle" or "Harry Potter" are used even though those characters together make no sense/don't make an actual word. A fun added layer of confusion is that transliterations are nearly always done so that the English words make the corresponding sounds for the Mandarin pronunciation... so when you say the same word in Cantonese, or another Chinese language, it might sound nothing like the original English word! A few examples of transliterations:

Harry Potter | 哈利波特 | haa1 lei6 bo1 dak6

Muggle | 麻瓜 | maa4 gwaa1

Privet Drive | 水蠟樹街 | seoi2 laap6 syu6 gaai1

Professor Dumbledore | 鄧布利多 | dang6 bou3 lei6 do1

As I read each night, I have the Pleco app open and I enter in words I don't know to translate as I go. Then I come across something like "司梅汀" and Pleco tells me these words mean "department", "plum" and "land along a river". This is confusing and doesn't make sense in the context - that's when I clue in that this must be a transliteration and I have to figure out what it is. It really makes me feel like quite the successful sleuth once I figure it out. If I can't place it, then I'll pop it into Google Translate and they have some (but not all) Harry Potter transliterations in their system! My last resort is to enter the Chinese text into Google and it might give me a search result on a Chinese HP Wiki page (which I cannot read in its entirety, but it might have an image that'll help!). For the record, 司梅汀 is Smeltings Academy!

As an educator that has done many reading assessments, I know that this book is far too difficult for my reading level! I am looking up far too many words and I am not achieving any sense of reading fluency or extensive reading - but I'm committed and am still enjoying the process! To give you a sense of just how painfully slow I'm reading - no, not really reading - decoding this book, the first chapter took me a month to finish. In the photo below, all the coloured 'underlining' (or is it 'sidelining' if the text is written vertically?) is vocab new for me... but hooray for all the words I do know!!

It has been nearly 3 months of plugging away and I am mid-way into Chapter 4! Whoo hoo - I'm getting a little faster! This has become a routine part of my evening that I actually look forward to. I feel a real sense of accomplishment with each page I read and I am still getting enjoyment of re-reading this familiar story - I'm currently at the part where Harry meets Hagrid (海格 | hoi2 gaak3) for the first time!