Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - Page 1 Vocabulary (Anki Deck)

This is a new Anki deck I created with 45 vocabulary words from the first page of Harry Potter. Each fact has a reading and audio recognition card.

Definitions are mostly from Jim Breen's WWWJDIC. The audio was recorded by a native Japanese speaker. I apologize for the quality of the audio. If this download becomes popular I will create a new recording with a better microphone.

Wow, I'm not quite ready to start reading Harry Potter yet, but thank you in advance for this deck!

Harry Potter gets mentioned so much I'm starting to think it's become part of status quo.

RTK > Tae Kim > KO2001 > Harry Potter > Free At Last

owenjd Wrote:Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - Page 1 Vocabulary (Anki Deck)

This is a new Anki deck I created with 45 vocabulary words from the first page of Harry Potter. Each fact has a reading and audio recognition card.

Definitions are mostly from Jim Breen's WWWJDIC. The audio was recorded by a native Japanese speaker. I apologize for the quality of the audio. If this download becomes popular I will create a new recording with a better microphone.

Breen's dictionary has audio, in case you didn't know this already. It's of excellent quality, so if you're unsatisfied with the audio in your deck you might want to look into it. You can download the mp3s directly (it's in a thread Bombpersons posted in elsewhere) or via Audacity or suchlike.

The Japanese audio books for Harry Potter are also floating around out there.

This seems like the best place to ask... but how are the books in Japanese? I don't want to start a fight or anything, but I'm curious. Why read it in Japanese instead of English?

I'm sure there's Japanese books at about the same level for Japanese kids, although I don't know any off hand (post a list if you've got one!)

PS: I'm a "go for the original" type. Just curious about the other side of things is all.

Why read HP in Japanese? Well, I think of it as a baby step. Divide and conquer. That sort of thing. I already know the story. I know I'm going to like the story. Fun vocab to learn, etc. Part of fairly current pop culture. So the one next step is getting it in Japanese. The tough part (so far) is mostly when Hagrid speaks, he has a dialect thing going, very colloquial. So, a good bit of what he says isn't "pure" Japanese, cannot be found in a dictionary or grammar book. Without a native speaker to check things out with, some utterances are, just to be perfectly honest, just guesses as to what the more standard Japanese equivalent might be. And I don't actually want to end up talking like Hagrid anyway.

As for similar level novels written in Japanese to start with, there's no guarantee for me that I'm going to like the story. I won't be familiar with the story, so it would probably be a bit more difficult to read (since that familiarity factor wouldn't be there). Then there is the point that, from Cusseta Georgia USA, I have to buy things "sight unseen" and pay pretty hefty shipping charges. I just hate it when I do that and get something that I cannot stomach. So, there's just that reluctance to go for something less familiar.

I'll save that for later, I think. In the meantime, there sure is a lot of HP. Then there's the Dan Brown novels (DaVinci Code, Angels & Demons, Puzzle Palace, etc.). Then the Bourne series. And I want to do the Ann McCaffrey books too. Heinlein. All my favorite authors, but in Japanese.

mezbup Wrote:Harry Potter gets mentioned so much I'm starting to think it's become part of status quo.

RTK > Tae Kim > KO2001 > Harry Potter > Free At Last

meh.

Beginner textbooks (Genki/Nakama/etc) -> RTK -> JLPT study materials (1/2kyuu) -> native stuff(=freedom) is a better order imo It's off-topic but I think having some Japanese basics before tackling RTK is a good idea.

nest0r, thanks for the recommendation. I'm familiar with the audio on Jim Breen's site but I was never able to download it directly. I'll check out Bombpersons thread and see if I can figure it out from there.

Grinkers, for me it's a matter of accessibility and comfort. There are many Harry Potter books available in Japanese and English with corresponding audio-books. Of course there are the movies too. It's much easier to read a book or watch a movie when you already know the content of the story. At least it is for me. I don't know if this is true but I've heard many times that English translated into Japanese is typically easier to read than native Japanese text. I recently found some classic Dragonlance novels in Japanese and I'm really looking forward to opening them up.

I think HP is a great resource if you like it. As for me, I'd prefer to read native texts in the original. That's my preference but my level of comprehension is still at the point where I'll take anything I can get. I have a number of Murakami novels and short stories in both English and Japanese. Of course that doesn't mean I can read them well. It's nice to have a number of options laying around the house. It's difficult (maybe impossible) to know when it's the right time to start reading a certain text. I think it's nice to try various texts throughout the course of your study though.

@ owenjd nice deck, thanks for sharing

For those of you who are mulling over whether to buy the Harry Potter books in Japanese, I found a forum which has the first book’s complete transcript published in search-able text (as posts not a download). This way you can figure out if it will hold your interest before you give up a leg for a physical copy + shipping (in reality the price isn’t bad but its preferable to buy something you know won’t just become best buddies with the dust in the corner…). The search-able text makes it easier to add the material to the srs so I’d imagine that it would also help anyone who’s already taken the plunge and bought the first book. Others have checked and said it’s accurate but I only have the English books at the moment so I can’t confirm that myself. Send me a pm and I’ll give you the link.

Grinkers Wrote:This seems like the best place to ask... but how are the books in Japanese? I don't want to start a fight or anything, but I'm curious. Why read it in Japanese instead of English?

I'm sure there's Japanese books at about the same level for Japanese kids, although I don't know any off hand (post a list if you've got one!)

PS: I'm a "go for the original" type. Just curious about the other side of things is all.

From the little bit I've read of mine, the original meaning gets lost a lot. For instance: (I'm paraphrasing because I don't have it in front of me.)

English: "We're just a normal family," he said humbly.
Japanese, translated back to English: "We're an honest family," he bragged.

That's quite a large difference in meaning. That's on the first page.

That's not going to stop me from reading it, though. Finding interesting books of my level is -really- hard because I don't read enough Japanese to be able to read reviews and such. So I'm sticking with something I know interested me in English.

I read a -lot- of manga and watch a lot of anime, too, though, so it's not like it's my only source of input or anything. (Plus, FF13 is overloading me with Japanese as well.)

Nice deck. Thank you owenjd. Is the Q&A website yours?

fightswumbrellas Wrote:For those of you who are mulling over whether to buy the Harry Potter books in Japanese, I found a forum which has the first book’s complete transcript published in search-able text (as posts not a download). This way you can figure out if it will hold your interest before you give up a leg for a physical copy + shipping (in reality the price isn’t bad but its preferable to buy something you know won’t just become best buddies with the dust in the corner…). The search-able text makes it easier to add the material to the srs so I’d imagine that it would also help anyone who’s already taken the plunge and bought the first book. Others have checked and said it’s accurate but I only have the English books at the moment so I can’t confirm that myself. Send me a pm and I’ll give you the link.

fightswumbrellas, check your email. I sent you a compressed file contains the 7 novels of Harry Potter in Japanese (in text files, txt.)

Thanks ahibba. I'm going to try and add a page every week. The Q&A website is mine. I'm looking for feedback on that too if you guys have any for me

You might find this set of pages on the Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese versions of Harry Potter interesting. Looks like the mainland Chinese version was a bit ropy...

I remember reading something about how the Chinese translation was groupsourced by forum users before there was any official publication. Maybe the site compares that version...

Thanks for the deck. It's actually my first sample of an audio prompt type of deck. I've got to say that I like that. I should try to do more of that. Still, I'd imagine that a sentence might be better than a single vocabulary word.

hey what a coincidence - look what I found on sale in that obscure Japanese bookshop in Soho last week:



I have opened them, and nice to flick through; lots of kanji have furigana. Still a bit above my level, plus I haven't read any Harry Potter books before so not sure what's going on..

aphasiac Wrote:I have opened them, and nice to flick through; lots of kanji have furigana. Still a bit above my level, plus I haven't read any Harry Potter books before so not sure what's going on..

Why 2 of the same book?

The book has been split into two parts (you can see the 上 and 下 at the bottom under the price sticker).

albion Wrote:The book has been split into two parts (you can see the 上 and 下 at the bottom under the price sticker).

Ah, I should have suspected that... Especially considering that I bought the Japanese versions of another author's books and they were split into 3, and they weren't nearly as big as HP.

@wccrawford: quite a lot of pages, so they split it up (上 / 下).

I think you referred to the very first sentence when you complained about the Japanese translation:
プリベット通り四番地の住人ダーズリー夫妻は、「おかげさまで、私どもはどこからみてもまともな人間です」と言うのが自慢だった。
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
Mr. und Mrs. Dursley im Ligusterweg Nummer 4 waren stolz darauf, ganz und gar normal zu sein, sehr stolz sogar.

I cross checked the complete first chapter and would say that the Japanese translation is quite close to the original text (much more than the German translation).

**Edit - Doh! Already answered above. That's what I get for caching pages and reading over time**

If you look at the base of the book binding you'll see 上 and 下. That's part 1 and 2 so they're separate books. It's very common in Japan to find books split into two or three books (1Q84 are in three parts for instance).

I like the idea as you can share easier while you're still reading, the books are smaller and easier to manage, and you don't have to buy the second if the first turns annoying.

Matthias Wrote:@wccrawford: quite a lot of pages, so they split it up (上 / 下).

I think you referred to the very first sentence when you complained about the Japanese translation:
プリベット通り四番地の住人ダーズリー夫妻は、「おかげさまで、私どもはどこからみてもまともな人間です」と言うのが自慢だった。
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
Mr. und Mrs. Dursley im Ligusterweg Nummer 4 waren stolz darauf, ganz und gar normal zu sein, sehr stolz sogar.

I cross checked the complete first chapter and would say that the Japanese translation is quite close to the original text (much more than the German translation).

The version I read in English definitely had Dursley's comment as a direct quote, not an indirect quote like that. That's a different version somehow.

Also you shouldn't expect that plugging the Japanese words into a dictionary will give Rowling's original English; that's not the way translation works, and it doesn't mean that the translation is inaccurate.

The major potential problem with using HP is that I've heard from numerous native speakers that HP, like most literature translated from English into Japanese, is often not completely natural Japanese but a sort of "English-translationese" that's common in these kind of books. So you shouldn't necessarily rely on HP for production help.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Also you shouldn't expect that plugging the Japanese words into a dictionary will give Rowling's original English; that's not the way translation works, and it doesn't mean that the translation is inaccurate.

The major potential problem with using HP is that I've heard from numerous native speakers that HP, like most literature translated from English into Japanese, is often not completely natural Japanese but a sort of "English-translationese" that's common in these kind of books. So you shouldn't necessarily rely on HP for production help.

I don't expect it to come back word for word, but the ideas of 'normal' and 'honest' are VERY different. Also, saying something humbly and bragging are quite different as well. Combined, they change the entire meaning of the sentence.

He was quite obviously bragging when he said it humbly. If you don't want to read the HP books don't read them.