Graded Readers, or Harry Potter?

[MorkTheFiddle]

Another alternative to Harry Potter is the Dragon Tattoo trilogy by Steig Larsson, which has the additional virtue of being filmed in two different movie versions. The original three movies covered all three novels, and I suppose the American set covered all three, too.

[stelingo]

Not a fan of Harry Potter myself. Are you familiar with this series of bilingual readers? They are generally short, around 100 pages.

https://44.pl/

[Cavesa]

Personally I would rather rip my eyes out with a fork than read Harry Potter again. You could just read a newspaper, online or paper. It would probably be cheaper too. On an average day, New York Times print edition has 150,000 words, most national papers would be similar, and you'd get a greater variety of vocabulary I figure.

While I totally understand HP is not universally liked, it is a good example of a first book in a foreign language. And the variety of vocabulary is exactly one of the reasons. The first book is usually difficult enough even without that much variety. On the other hand, books like HP use much more relevant language for an intermediate learner, or for an advanced learner focusing on everyday language close to the spoken one. That doesn't mean it is in general better for everyone than newspapers, it just does something different.

[reineke]

Harry Potter is not a good first, second or third book (unless you are absolutely in love with this series). The comparison with graded readers is inappropriate. Try with the Goosebumps series.

[Iversen]

I would go with reineke: you should experiment with parallel texts. If you know beforehand what a certain phrase is supposed to mean then it becomes less of a problem to understand it, and you avoid looking words up all the time. There is however a practical problem with books including Harry Potter, namely that it is cumbersome to juggle around with two books and avoid that they close by themselves. Another problem: some translations are quite far from the original - not only can they have cuts in the text, but the translation can be quite different from the original version. Harry Potter translations are generally OK because they are heavily controlled, but in other cases you may have the feeling that the translator would have preferred to write the book from scratch.

My own solution to this has been to use machine translations of texts from the internet (always target language to base language) and accept that they aren't perfect. You can usually spot the totally idiotic errors in the translations, and if they just give you enough information to make better guesses yourself then everything is OK. Otherwise you still have your dictionary as a last resort.

PS: dubious words should be controlled before you enter them into Anki (or wordlists), because errors at that stage will enter your permanent vocabulary. Misperceptions about words you just see once while reading are less harmful.

[Cavesa]

HP being so controlled is one of the reasons why it is a good example. I wouldn't be so sure about the same precision of other popular examples, like Le Petit Prince.

The parallel books are great, as long as you can find some. That can be quite a challenge outside the most common language combinations.

However, I think the parallel texts should be left behind asap, because they make reading far too easy and damage the immersion part of learning. It is harder to keep thinking in the target language and far too easy to look stuff up.

[aaleks]

Harry Potter translations are generally OK because they are heavily controlled, but in other cases you may have the feeling that the translator would have preferred to write the book from scratch.

HP being so controlled is one of the reasons why it is a good example.

I guess two Russian translations of the book series are an unlucky exception. The newest translation, seems, is even worse than the first one. It's written in.. well... too colloquial, and also poor and clumsy language. From what I've read (there's written a lot on the Internet about that), originally it was an amateur translation - just for family and friends. Sort of just for fun.

[reineke]

Parallel text books are easy to handle.

Bilingual books may include specially prepared translations (such as in Dover editions).

Books may also be published with difficult vocabulary glossed in the margins. See Linguatext for Spanish and French.

There are also interlinear texts. Where's Keyes?

Juggling HP, its literary translation and an extra dictionary does not appear like a great solution.Besides, the books are neither easy nor short enough for novice FL readers.

[DaveBee]

Parallel text books are easy to handle.

Bilingual books may include specially prepared translations (such as in Dover editions).

Books may also be published with difficult vocabulary glossed in the margins. See Linguatext for Spanish and French.

There are also interlinear texts. Where's Keyes?

Juggling HP, its literary translation and an extra dictionary does not appear like a great solution.Besides, the books are neither easy nor short enough for novice FL readers.

I read a few monolingual eBooks arranged paired L1:L2 on a screen. Even just having the L1 version in another window when needed was useful.

[ASEAN]

You may already know this, but David Snopek learned Polish by reading the Harry Potter series. Unfortunately Snopek's more recent website chronicling the entire process no longer exists. I believe it took four months for him to finish the first book and each successive book took less time. I am not sure but he may have finished the series in about a year.

His older website detailing his experience starting the first Harry Potter book is still around and so is his old Polish-language YouTube channel.

http://hackyourlife.org/p/25
https://www.youtube.com/user/dsnopek/videos

David Snopek's more recent blog is back online!

http://www.linguatrek.com/blog/2010/12/ ... me-polish/