some interesting - and some useless - HP vocab

I’ve been reading Harry Potter for FOUR months now! I can’t believe I’m still plugging away at it… it is some sloooow going! I’m still trying to read a bit every night, but I admit that I don’t bring it with me when we go camping or on a trip - my dedication has limits. I recently made it to the 100-page milestone!!! While I am very excited and proud of this milestone, I have to consciously stop myself from doing the math of how many pages I’m averaging a month because this may be the. slowest. I. have. ever. read. a. book. Well... Anna Karenina took me a year to read... let's see if I can finish this one before next April...

People who know me know that I am a voracious reader - I am never not reading. However, 2022 seems to have turned into the Year of Chinese Reading for me, and it has taken over all my reading time... so not only am I barely reading Harry Potter in Chinese - I’m not really reading anything in English, either! It is definitely a (temporary) shift in identity, I’m prioritizing my Chinese reading at the moment. I hope one day reading Chinese won’t take SO MUCH TIME and ENERGY... I dream of the day when I can read Chinese stories fluently and I have the time and energy to read English books again, too! However, that day is not today. Below is a picture of the most recent page I’ve read - and all the underlined\sidelined words that I don’t know and had to look up with Pleco (words in squares are idioms).

On with some vocab! For my fellow Canto-learners (and anyone else interested), here is some interesting vocab I’ve learned over the past 100 pages/4 months. One thing I’m still learning is whether some of this vocab is used among Cantonese speakers; this book was published in Traditional Chinese text in Taiwan, where they speak Mandarin, so some of the phrasing and diction may be used in Mandarin but not Cantonese.

Idioms:

一清二楚 | jat1 cing1 ji6 co2 | perfectly clear

一乾二淨 | jat1 gon1 ji6 zeng6 | thoroughly, completely

胡思亂想 | wu4 si1 lyun6 soeng2 | let one’s imagination run away

大錯特錯 |daai6 co3 dak6 co3 | completely mistaken

興而易舉 | hing1 ji4 jik6 geoi2 | easy to do

做牛做馬 | zou6 ngau4 zou6 maa5 | to work extremely hard

忍無可忍 | jan2 mou4 ho2 jan2| driven beyond limits, at the end of one’s patience

Completely HP specific:

達力 | daat6 lik6 | Dudley

威農 | wai1 nung4 | Vernon

佩妮 | pui3 nei4 | Petunia

德思禮 | dak1 si1 lai5 | Dursley

莉莉 & 詹姆 | lei6 lei6 & zim1 mou5 | Lily & James

霍格華茲 | fok3 gaak3 waa4 zi1 | Hogwarts

古靈閣 | gu2 ling4 gok3 | Gringotts

魁地奇 | fui1 dei6 kei4| Quidditch

阿不思 鄧不利多 | aa3 bat1 si1 dang6 bat1 lei6 do1 | Albus Dumbledore

海格 | hoi2 gaak3 | Hagrid

破釜酒吧 | po3 fu2 zau2 baa1 | The Leaky Cauldron

斜角巷 | ce4 gok3 hong6 | Diagon Alley

Words I still can’t seem to learn despite reading them repeatedly:

許多 | heoi2 do1 | many; a lot of

某種 | mau5 zung2 | some kind of

憤怒 | fan5 nou6 | angry

確定 | kok3 ding6 | define, fix, determine

曉得 | hiu2 dak1 | know

顯然| hin2 jin4 | obvious, evident

顯得 | hin2 dak1 | look, appear, seem