At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby german2k01 » Fri Oct 22, 2021 8:19 pm

As a side question that just popped into my head. When you got into reading original books (not graded readers), what was your tolerance level for accepting ambiguity? As you said you were reading books in a flow state, I presumed that you looked up words here and there but not too often to disturb the flow state while reading? Did you read the synopsis of a book online before doing an actual reading of the book?
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby AllSubNoDub » Fri Oct 22, 2021 9:47 pm

german2k01 wrote:As a side question that just popped into my head. When you got into reading original books (not graded readers), what was your tolerance level for accepting ambiguity? As you said you were reading books in a flow state, I presumed that you looked up words here and there but not too often to disturb the flow state while reading? Did you read the synopsis of a book online before doing an actual reading of the book?


I would devour news and non-fiction articles and I would look up everything. If I read books, I would look up quite a bit if needed, but I generally had very high comprehension of whatever I was reading, so it was not a problem (again, looking back, I probably should have read more fiction, where I likely would have struggled more). I didn't/don't tolerate ambiguity very well.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby M23 » Sat Oct 23, 2021 6:14 pm

I am not sure what CEFR level I was at, but I read a couple of the Harry Potter books when I was at the stage that young adult literature was challenging, but not too challenging. It was at the point where I had to look up some words, but not so many that it made getting through a page difficult.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby zjones » Mon Dec 20, 2021 8:53 pm

I think I must have been low B1 in French. I remember the first book being really hard. I quailed at the first paragraph, but I had spent money on the book so I pushed through. It was my first exposure to the passé simple tense.

I read the first book in paperback form, and later books with Kindle because of the built-in dictionary. The books got easier as they went along, but I also grew distaste for the way side characters were portrayed, which led me to abandon the series at Book 5. I wouldn't read it again. I feel like there are enough equivalent original series in other languages. However, I understand that being familiar with the series can be helpful for many people.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby reineke » Mon Dec 20, 2021 10:38 pm

Quoting myself (it happens)

"The seven (HP) books contain around 21000 unique words. Assuming you've read and understood all these words and their collocations you will have traces of this written knowledge somewhere in your head. What happens between your ears and in your phonological loop is anyone's guess. Words keep company and stretch into sentences. Eventually you may wish to tackle more advanced syntax.
The individual books count between 5000 and 7000 unique words. The books get progressively longer and contain more unique words."

The last three books count more unique words than the first four.

HP unique kanji
Chapter 1 – 569 kanji
Chapter 1 and 2 – 739 kanji
Chapters 1 to 3 – 893 kanji
Chapters 1 to 4 – 991 kanji"

The Chinese edition of HP counts around 2500 unique characters."

If later books felt easier it's because you were getting better at reading in your target language and getting familiar with the series.

"A good graded reader may have about 500 unique words and such a book will be labeled A2, B1 etc. Some people have tried laddering their way into language learning heaven with graded readers and found them wanting. Harry Potter is also touted as a linguistic cure-all.
The Little Prince counts 2300 unique words in French spread over 85 pages. It's a children's book, an adult book and a modern classic. It's also no longer copyrighted in many countries. It's not for everyone but neither is Harry Potter...

Books sorted by lexile levels

"Within a range from 100L below to 50L above his or her Lexile measure, a reader is expected to comprehend the text well enough to understand it, while still experiencing some reading challenge."

Magic Tree House by Mary Pope Osborne, Natalie Pope Boyce (Lexile Levels 230 - 590)
Goosebumps Original Series by R. L. Stine (Lexile Levels 280 - 640)
Judy Moody by Megan McDonald (Lexile Levels 390 - 600)
Artemis Fowl Graphic Novels by Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin (Lexile Levels estimated 535 - 635)
Hardy Boys are the Clues Brothers by Franklin W. Dixon (Lexile Levels 330 - 580)
Hardy Boys Secret Files by Franklin W. Dixon (Lexile Levels 510 - 540)
Geronimo Stilton (Lexile Levels 500 - 720)
Enid Blyton
The Famous Five 650 - 700
Alex Rider 670 - 770
Percy Jackson & the Olympians by Rick Riordan (Lexile Levels 590 - 740)
Nancy Drew Girl Detective by Carolyn Keene (Lexile Levels 560 - 820)
Roald Dahl Classics by Roald Dahl (Lexile Levels 450 - 870)
Roald Dahl Short Stories by Roald Dahl (Lexile Levels 410 - 980)
Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black, Tony DiTerlizzi (Lexile Levels 560 - 690)
Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None 570
The Murder on the Links: A Hercule Poirot ...730
A Murder Is Announced 740
The ABC. Murders 740
Murder on the Orient Express 640
Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer (Lexile Levels 670 - 720)
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep -- 660
Bambi by Felix Salten 690 (translated)
Where the Red Fern Grows 700
The Little Prince 710
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer (Lexile Levels 600 - 930)
Bartimaeus by Jonathan Stroud (Lexile Levels 730 - 820)
Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (Lexile Levels 790 - 970)
Tom Sawyer, Detective 700
E.B. White Classics by E. B. White (Lexile Levels 680 - 920)
Redwall by Brian Jacques (Lexile Levels 600 - 1010)
Guardians of Ga'Hoole by Kathryn Lasky (Lexile Levels 730 - 960)
I, Robot 820
Pinocchio 840
The Da Vinci Code 850
Stephen King The Stand 840
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 850
To Kill A Mockingbird 870
Wuthering Heights 880
The Ox-Bow Incident 890
Fahrenheit 451 890
Jane Eyre 890
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (Lexile Levels 890 - 950)
Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (Lexile Levels 810 - 920)
Tales from the Brothers Grimm 900
Hans Christian Andersen Tales 950
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm 960
Anne of Green Gables 990
Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling, (Lexile Levels 880 - 1030)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 1020
Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne 1070 (translated)
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (Lexile Levels 1000 - 1370)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 950
The Brothers Karamazov 970
White Fang 970
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Adams, Douglas 1000
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 1010 (English translation) 23334 unique words
Madame Bovary (Engl. tr.) 1030
Jungle Book 1080
The Red and the Black (Engl. tr.) 1080
The Count of Monte Cristo (Engl. tr.) 1080
16110 unique words
War and Peace 1120 Around 20k unique words
Plato's Parmenides 1140
The Tale of Genji (Engl. tr.) 1190
Moby Dick 1220
17227 unique words ("dense")
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (tr.) 1290
Gulliver's Travels 1330
Gargantua and Pantagruel 1340"

Personally I've scanned the series out of curiosity and found that:

“Harry Potter is not a good first, second or third book (unless you are absolutely in love with this series).

The Hobbit has a higher Lexile score than LOTR even though it's more of a children's book and I personally feel that it feels easier than LOTR and Harry Potter. Based on the Lexile score the first book in the Harry Potter series should feel somewhat easier. As someone noted, the Lexile score for The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is 680 which is considerably lower than Harry Potter. It's a useful tool but it cannot replace an experienced adult reader's personal evaluation. I think the Goosebumps series followed by The Little Prince and some Enid Blyton would feel considerably easier than Harry Potter."


If you’re studying an IE language (and can read this) you’ll do OK…I guess. I personally wouldn't choose HP as my first book in Russian (coming from English) but some people have survived reading War and Peace. If you’re studying your second language from the same family HP won’t be too challenging but you may end up asking yourself if this trip was really necessary. English and Romance languages are not in the same family but vocabulary wise they might as well be.

If you’re studying a language from a group of languages distant from your own… gee whiz, I don’t know. You may wish to reconsider, with a couple of caveats:
1 You can easily find HP and little else in a less commonly taught language since everyone and their mom is doing it
2 I kinda forgot what I was going to write here
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby Saim » Mon Dec 20, 2021 11:49 pm

AllSubNoDub wrote:You're right in his general method though: 1. Read through a basic grammar book (don't do exercises, just read), 2. Make bilingual sentence cards for all the example sentences. The sentences aren't memorized though, they are just comprehension cards. He only optionally suggests further grammar instruction if, 1. You have already achieved a very high level in the language and can intuit all of the grammar already, 2. It interests you.

Anyway, I feel like courses that "sprinkle in" grammar combined with lots of comprehensible input, e.g. Assimil, are very effective for most people. Best to intuitively learn grammar and explicitly learn vocabulary, but implicit and explicit knowledge of both would be optimal.


See, this is what I don't get about how AJATT and Refold are advertised. How is reading grammar theory and then actively memorising examples of various grammar rules "not studying grammar"? Not doing the exercises in grammar books doesn't mean you're "not studying grammar", you're just making your own metalinguistic exercises (memorising example sentences) to do rather than the ones the book suggests.

I personally use methods that are very similar to what is recommended by Refold, but I wouldn't describe them as "not studying grammar" or "only intuiting grammar" at all.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby Dragon27 » Tue Dec 21, 2021 6:38 am

The original AJATT author had quite a radical view on some aspects of language learning. On the subject of grammar he wrote a couple of articles with a self-explanatory title Grammar Does Not Exist (2). Anyway, the original AJATT approach is mostly considered historical (by this hypothetical 'AJATT/MIA/Refold community'), and the modern approach is whatever Matt calls it nowadays. Matt aimed from the start to be a spiritual successor of "the approach" (seeing the usefulness of its ideas), but at the same time call in questions some of its more radical claims, so one shouldn't apply whatever one learned from AJATT to the current state of the development of its ideas.

I wouldn't say that Refold is being advertised as "do not study grammar" approach, at least not by its authors. If you want to know what Refold says about studying grammar, you can just read it on its official page. In reality, of course, when people want to form their opinion about something they don't usually go to original sources, study it in detail and think through the possible implications. The just fall back on the stereotypes floating around in the collective psyche and fill up the details using their own imagination. And there is a lot of stereotypes about the method, things like "you shouldn't study grammar", "you shouldn't speak early", "input alone is enough to reach native fluency".
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby Saim » Tue Dec 21, 2021 7:31 am

Perhaps "advertised" was the wrong word, I'm talking about what I see people in the "input-heavy" sphere on the internet say about grammar and how it shouldn't be studied at all, which as you rightly pointed out isn't what Refold actually recommends. I was mainly responding to sentences like: "A lot of the AJATT guys have gotten to N1+ and never studied any grammar".

As I said, my personal approach to studying grammar is pretty much the same as that of Refold. That said, I don't think this should be proposed as a universal method of learning: the level of explicit grammar instruction necessary will depend on the learner's metalinguistic competence and the language pair in question, so I'd avoid making strict prescriptions on the exact amount of grammar study and what form it should take (I think drills and exercises can be useful).
Last edited by Saim on Tue Dec 21, 2021 9:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby reineke » Tue Dec 21, 2021 5:52 pm

Harry Potter, Lexile scores and grade reading levels

1 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone 880L

2 Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 940L

3 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 880L

4 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 880L

1-4 Grade reading level 4-6

5 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 950L

Grade Reading Level 4-8

6 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 920L

Grades 5-8

7 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 880L

Grades 6-12

Lexile levels

"Within a range from 100L below to 50L above his or her Lexile measure, a reader is expected to comprehend the text well enough to understand it, while still experiencing some reading challenge."

CEFR level Student aggregate Range Graded Reader Text Aggregate Range
A1 0L - 620L 230-340L
A2 180L-910L 425L-715L
B1 705L-1210L 588-860L
B2 1000L-1370L 598-993L
C1 1290-1400L 760-1200L
C2 1405L-1595L


Issues:

- Missing input in the 0L - 880L Lexile range which could fill a library of adult/young adult/children's titles.

- 6/7 titles are in a narrow Lexile score range 880L - 950 (4 are labeled grades 4-6)

- Not a bad B1 starter series but titles in the 880L-950L Lexile range are not rare

Total word count for the seven Harry Potter books is over 1 million words which is a nice round number. The seven books contain around 21000 unique words. The first book counts less than 5000 unique words. The books get progressively longer and contain more unique words but within a narrow (updated) Lexile range (880 - 950). Based on the wide range of student performance shown above, some students would be capable of tackling the first book early (A2) while slower readers may find it too challenging at B1 level. At B2 level students should be able to read all the books in the series but at that level they may wish to consider varying their reading if they're reading at level and/or choosing more challenging reading material.

https://metametricsinc.com/wp-content/u ... CEFR_1.pdf

Harry Potter vs. Edgar Allan Poe
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... er#p153967
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Re: At What CEFR Level Did You Start Reading Harry Potter?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Dec 21, 2021 7:59 pm

I haven't read Harry Potter even in my native language. I gave it a try when they were riding high on hype, I even got the book for free. It was utterly boring, pseudo-philosophy for children and I couldn't stomach it beyond a 1/4 of the book. I don't know how people use these for language learning, having to contend with that dreadful content when it's already an uphill struggle.
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