Hi people,

I am starting a Harry Potter study group (ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石) , and I'd welcome fellow students. The group will be pitched at beginner level (I'm a rank newbie), but should be useful for intermediate students. If any advanced students want to help us out, that would also be appreciated. The only prerequisite is that you know kana and want to learn kanji.

I won't be providing protected content, but it is easy enough to buy the text and audio for HP online. Once you have the relevant content, there are ways of automatically extracting sentences and words, looking the words up in Edict, and making an audio-linked glossary. For instance, you will be able to click on a kanji or a word and hear the relevant sentences from Harry Potter. (I already have this working for kanji, but only have the right data for the first 22 sentences.)

What I would like help with is:
developing the glossary (I already have a list of unique words in order of appearance, extracted with mecab)
aligning the Japanese sentences with the English version
decoding the grammar at newbie level (identify clauses, subject, object, verb etc for the first few paragraphs, and then merely note new grammatical constructs as they appear)
noting the start and end times of each spoken sentence, using a product such as Adacity (this allows the audio-linked glossary to be developed).

I'm not an Anki user myself (I'll be using my own program for learning all of this), but the results could easily be adapated for Anki.

If you are interested, please contact me via email: crgmccollATyahooDOTcomDOTau, or express interest here:
http://cerebware.pcriot.com/wordpress/fo...postid-522

There are two of us currently, but a group of about five would give a better reward-to-effort ratio. I must warn you, I have only been learning Japanese for a couple of months, so I don't offer any particular expertise, but I am a hobbyist programmer who could probably provide any learning feature you wanted (if you can articulate the algorithm.)

Cheers,

Craig.

Sounds like an interesting project but a word of warning, Harry Potter books in Japanese are in no way easy. There are Japanese authors whose writing is much easier with more useful vocab and a more natural writing style. I guess you might know this already..

Having said that I've listened to the audio books countless times, mostly because of the lack of other Japanese audiobooks. So if you want audio it might still be the best option.

Anyways, good luck

Hi Caivano.

Yeah, I'm aware of the potential 'unnaturalness' of Japanese HP. My familiarity with the book and the availability of the audio more than makes up for that, in my own case. I've been listening to it in the car and can (almost) get the general gist of the first chapter just by picking out the katakana-ized words and the occasional name, then remembering the English version. It creates the illusion of understanding.

I'm guessing ~90% of the vocab will be useful for other novels, given that I'm a complete beginner and need to pick up words like 'book', 'table', 'eat' etc.

I am going to tackle 'Breaking into Japanese Literature' as well, probably in parallel, but want to get HP underway first.

Just out of curiosity, what other novel-length books would you recommend with unabridged matching audio?

Cheers,

Craig.

Torrential Wrote:My familiarity with the book and the availability of the audio more than makes up for that, in my own case. I've been listening to it in the car and can (almost) get the general gist of the first chapter just by picking out the katakana-ized words and the occasional name, then remembering the English version. It creates the illusion of understanding.

I agree about familiarity, its really a huge factor for me as well. Vocabulary might be a bit peculiar but most of it repeats so often you eventually get used to it.

I was a bit more advanced than OP when I tried this but I found L-R very useful method of learning and increasing my comprehension. What I did:

1. Read a page in English (texts native language) or your native language.
2. Read that page in Japanese in Yomichan (its much faster to search words like that).
3. Listen to audio of that page.
4. Do both simultaneously - read Japanese while listening (at first it seems impossible to keep up but trust me the lector is dead slow in HP and you'll eventually reach that speed).
5. Repeat steps 2,3,4 as needed (1st usually isn't needed but if something gives you trouble use it as reference and look for translation), depending on where you struggle.

This method took me through book 1 and it was really helpful, you essentially push your limits with every page at first but that's what you need to do to grow. You gather vocabulary through Yomichan for separate study later, you boost reading speed by trying to read with audio and finally work slowly on comprehension in step 2 assisted by translation, dictionary and grammar resources.

Needless to say when I first bought the book, reading 1 page took insane amounts of time (partially because I was using a normal dictionary back then, that's why Yomichan is NOT optional!!) but after that first hurdle I can now pick the book in its paper form and actually read, not fast, not even with 90% comprehension but still comfortably and fast enough to actually enjoy.

Torrential Wrote:Just out of curiosity, what other novel-length books would you recommend with unabridged matching audio?

I haven't read any books from the audiobooks available personally but I asked my gf, who is really into fiction if any were good and she recommended:

砂漠 - 伊坂幸太郎 http://www.febe.jp/product/98246
and
空中ブランコ - 奥田英朗 http://www.febe.jp/search?sg=601

They sound pretty good from the samples. Not sure how easy the story would be to follow from just the Japanese though.

Here's another person with experience in using Harry Potter to warn you. I L-R'd each of the first two HP books in Japanese at least 10 times and although I can understand almost everything I hear by now, it didn't bring my fluency level up high enough to understand other things.

digitlhand Wrote:Here's another person with experience in using Harry Potter to warn you. I L-R'd each of the first two HP books in Japanese at least 10 times and although I can understand almost everything I hear by now, it didn't bring my fluency level up high enough to understand other things.

Well that's pretty understandable, you need to L-R or read lots of other books before you can comfortably approach unknown works. Using an extreme example: you wouldn't expect to learn modern English properly if you exclusively read Shakespeare.

Hi there,

Yes, I am intending to read HP with virtually no experience. Part of my reasoning is that I want to learn a whole pile of vocab any way, so why not learn that pile and use the contextual cues of a real source for their mnemonic value? The other part is I want something to listen to in the car. I believe a large part of language processing and language acquisition is subconscious/preconscious, and the early phases involve statistical sorting of inputs by neural networks to which we we have poor conscious access. Just studying single sentences in grammar books starves these networks of input, as far as I am concerned. I've been listening to Chapter One and already it sounds more like individual words than it did a week ago.

I don't believe pure immersion is possible for me, though, or even the most efficient approach. I'm going to be reading grammar books, and studying along more traditional lines in addition to the HP study - but nothing makes a grammar point stick as well, for me, as seeing and hearing it used "in the wild". I know this approach would not suit many others.

Finally, if it proves impossible at first to make headway, that will make me pay much more attention to my grammar reading. I'll have a real need for the missing skills.

@Hyperborea... You'll have to go looking for the pdf. The digital version is great for things like automatic vocab extraction and glossary generation but I recommend that people acquire a hard copy (like you have) as well as the pdf. If you wanted to join the group, I could point you in the right direction.

Cheers,

Torrential.

thurd Wrote:Needless to say when I first bought the book, reading 1 page took insane amounts of time (partially because I was using a normal dictionary back then, that's why Yomichan is NOT optional!!) but after that first hurdle I can now pick the book in its paper form and actually read, not fast, not even with 90% comprehension but still comfortably and fast enough to actually enjoy.

Have you tried reading a HP book you hadnt read in Japanese since?

After studying HP 1 and 2 extensively I can read them easilily but I tried HP 3 and it was ridiculously slow going. I had pretty much just got used to the story and Lang in the context of the individual books and it didn't translate to actually understanding much outside that books.

I will also caution that the familiarity with the work can cause this to backfire. In my experience, parallel text is a dreadful way to study. Unless you can control your own use of it extremely well it has a tendency to prevent your brain from trying to ascertain meaning on its own. You're taking a kind of shortcut between Japanese reading and understanding that doesn't seem like it works your brain in the same was as trying to piece together the meaning of a sentence based on its components and composition. It's easy to avoid learning why sentences mean what they mean when you have parallel text available.

I'm not saying it can't be useful if done in certain ways, but I think some of you may have the wrong kind of expectations about what you might get from a study strategy like this. This project could very easily end up with people learning quite a lot of vocabulary, but next to no actual reading or listening comprehension.

I think a better project would be a study guide for a light novel from an actual Japanese author. Do not go for an English translation with parallel text. Simply put together a chapter by chapter vocabulary and grammar guide that can be used by students to help decode the meaning of the work on their own. I think the whole parallel text thing is quite unnecessary.

It's also my opinion, and people are free to disagree, that fantastical works like this do not make for great beginner material. Fantasy fundamentally is about subverting expectations that are rooted in the real world, and this can make the text extremely hard to understand for beginners. In a fantasy text, "Their eyes were ringed with fire..." could very mean there were literally rings of actual fire encircling their eyes -OR- they're just angry.

A great example of this is Le Petit Prince. It may be considered a children's book, but the language it uses is pretty tough. There's quite a lot of allegory and metaphor mixed in with actual fantastical situations. It's difficult at times to puzzle out exactly what is supposed to be happening in the narrative. Harry Potter is quite a lot more verbose and has more plot than Le Petit Prince so I think it would be less problematic, but still could pose an unnecessary challenge at this stage of people's Japanese study.

Some of Haruki Murakami's more down to earth works or something by Natsuo Kirino seems like it would be a lot more appropriate. Things that are based in reality while still being interesting I think are best to start out with.

The textbooks that I've worked with included 'scenarios' at the start of each chapter that, while trite, did serve to provide a certain amount of context-filled text with ordinary situations, along with diary entries, etc, and generally following a cohesive if uninspired story from start to end. Of course, there are lots of reasons to dislike the average textbook, but that all of the sentences are isolated and lack context should not be one of them. Of course, this is not true of web grammar resources which do illustrate with single example sentences.

Anyway, while I think a certain amount of preliminary study is advisable, there do seem to be people who successfully learn from a listening-reading method with parallel texts, so be sure to check out this thread: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6840
Although, stickied as it is, you may already be familiar with it. Notice though that buonaparte and the folks at learnanylanguage using similar methods all worked through textbook sentences and dialogs first before working through full texts.

I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with using Harry Potter or any other familiar story as a starting point -after- getting a basic familiarity with grammar, so long as your goal is reading stories. (Of course, personally, I feel actual language of Harry Potter is a tremendous part of its charm. There are plenty of predecessors in the general notion of 'boy wizard story', but Rowling's way with words is itself magical.
Ahem. Pardon the digression.)

If your goal is speaking to Japanese people, you'll be effectively wasting your time with Harry Potter, between the issues of written language vs. spoken language and the oddities of translated texts. That is, the over-given advice of 'don't learn japanese from manga/anime/fantasy/scifi/jpop it's not normal japanese' ... is true if you plan to work in Japan in some non-media industry, and it's nonsense if your goal is to consume those very media. I don't personally think the difference between translated works and native works is worth worrying about, although perhaps I'm not qualified to comment since I don't care for translated works... but I do understand from various grammar discussions that many 'unnatural' elements from literal translations end up being incorporated into native writing styles anyway.

Thanks to the various posters for pointing out some of the caveats.

I'd still like to hear from people who would like to supplement their conventional study with vocab and grammar exercises derived from HP, along with several hours of listening.

Complete beginners might want to study grammar first, as some have recommended, but I remain convinced that, for me at least, the potential benefits of studying grammar along with this reading project will far outweigh the potential problems.

If you enter this with the naive view that reading one book will teach you to speak fluent Japanese, you will of course be disappointed.

What do you want do with regards to grammar? I might be up for that.

By the way how many unique words are in Harry Potter? It'd be interesting to compare it to other novels

I shadow read HP 1/2 along with the audio book some time ago. However, these books are bit difficult, and reading them before upper intermediate level will take far to long imo.

At the same time I was experimenting with L/R for Japanese, and in my experience it was a waste of time. On the other hand L/R worked well for Russian/Spanish (I also used books 1/2 of HP)

I own both 1/2 HP books in Japanese, but ended up downloading the bootleg digital versions because the vertical text was getting annoying. Just google "ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石" "生き残った男の子" and you should eventually find it

Anyways, these should be helpful if you are determined to make a go at it:

line by line translation
http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/willmollywilly/...74482.html
ガイライゴｗｏｒｄｓ
http://www.yk.rim.or.jp/~guessac/harrypotter/index.htm

caivano Wrote:By the way how many unique words are in Harry Potter? It'd be interesting to compare it to other novels

I was pondering that question myself, just today. I can get back to you with some stats if you like. The stats will only be an approximation, however, given that words will have been machine-extracted, a process that is rather error-prone.

There are two potential counts of unique words, depending on what is defined as unique. One count would be the number of unique strings found after parsing by mecab. This method will count different conjugations of the same root word as being distinct. I got 1595 unique strings in Chapter One, and would expect declining numbers in subsequent chapters. I can process the other chapters and get back to you on that.

A better definition would be the number of unique words after converting everything to its dictionary form. I don't yet have the knowledge to do that. A *rough* approximation of this could be to strip trailing kana from every string containing kanji, so that different conjugated forms would be pooled. This would also pool different parts of speech in many cases - i.e. adjectives, nouns and verbs containing the same kanji would be lumped togather. I plan to count them by this means as well.

One of the reasons I am curious about such stats is that I would like to get a sense of the vocab overlap in different Japanese sources. This relates directly to the view that studying one source or another is inappropriate because of its specialised vocabulary. For instance, if I pick a Japanese adult crime novel, process it with mecab, and then do the same for HP, what percentage overlap is there in vocabulary? My guess is about 90%, though I don't have any data to back up that intuition. (I know similar calculations have been made for English sources, and there is a core of common vocabulary that gives about 90% coverage of most texts.)

http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/fltr/germ/etan...b/cup.html

In terms of grammar study in HP, I will be starting with the absolute basics - identifying the main verb, splitting sentences into clauses, looking at which conjugations have been employed. You are probably too advanced to get much out of those early stages, and would find the process too slow, unless you wanted to play the role of teacher.

Cheers,

Torrential.
[edited grammar/spelling]

oregum Wrote:Anyways, these should be helpful if you are determined to make a go at it:

Wow, thanks for the links. They will be very helpful.

Re: the word counts, I guess if you compared 2 novels using the same method it might be a useful comparison even if it's not accurate.

How about comparing the amount of unique kanji? Is that easy and accurate?

Re: the grammar, I guess it would be more useful for a beginner to do it, I could check it if you like.

A beginner reading a novel, I've tried that before, *shudders*. Scary.. I ordered native light novels from Japan without knowing any Japanese and thought to myself "hey, all I have to do is read read read, using google dictionary, and I'll eventually get faster at reading Japanese books, right?" Wrong, I didn't have the basis for grammar and hitting 3-5 roadbumps every sentence became quite the suisance. Not sure if thats what your doing, if you suceed I'll be really impressed.

caivano Wrote:How about comparing the amount of unique kanji? Is that easy and accurate?

Yes, that's pretty straight-forward. There are 1603 unique kanji in HP book 1. Starting with the RTK list of 2043 kanji, and comparing it to the 17 chapters of HP, reveals the following mismatches:

Missing in HP: (636 RTK kanji)
Missing in RTK: (196 HP kanji)

Size of combined pool: 2239 (HP + RTK).

(There might be minor errors in these numbers, as I am yet to check the machine-generated lists.)

These were the kanji not found in RTK Vol 1, but used in HP:
詮誰嗅嬉々噂鞄頬頃叩湧甥那雤焚椅咳闇縞髷忚戚蹴喉釆膝鍮謎貼挨拶鷲匂閏掻爬這拳肋俺眩閃杖揃刉蝋粥鍵呟轢籠尻敶巴釘槌吊軋轟枞股琥珀吠嘴綴呪錆癇癪眉獰紐沙汰艘〇鍋錫箒痙攣脾樽尖秤叉舵鍾筍顎嘘务讐耽剥埃褪奢妖樫肘芯楓檀柊唖絨毯柵蛙鈎胡椒雛呆芻泤崖狡猾堵卿鎧蓋炸牢廻聡釜煎屌璧鉾愕喧嘩坦鷹叱掴槍痺狐拭棍馳渾梶糊蒼唾裾噛脊椎妬嘲樅畏濡頓悸貪霞枕兎狼欝罠孵餌唄溜淋喋牽稽捉挽閻晃骸臆痕苔蹄梳囁淵磐賂跨兜唸采

I note that (at least) two of these shouldn't really count as kanji: 々 and 〇.

I was wondering if someone would be so kind as to help me translate some sentences from HP... I have gone through the first chapter and matched up the Japanese and English so that numbered sentences in each version correspond. In some cases I had to join or split English sentences to match the Japanese.

The correlation with the English was poorest for the following section. Putting aside the original English, what would be the most natural translation of these sentences?

19. ―――そんな子と、うちのダドリーが関わり合いになるなんて……

20. それもポッター一家を遠ざけている理由の一つだった

21. さて、ある火曜日の朝のことだ

22. ダーズリー一家が目を覚ますと、外はどんよりとした灰色の空だった

23. 物語はここから始まる

24. まか不思議なことがまもなくイギリス中で起ころうとしているなんて、そんな気配は曇り空のどこにもなかった

Thanks for any help you are able to provide.

Cheers,

Torrential.

19. ―――そんな子と、うちのダドリーが関わり合いになるなんて……
"For our Dudley to be involved with such a child, what a thing!"

20. それもポッター一家を遠ざけている理由の一つだった
"That was another reason to remain distant from the Potters."

21. さて、ある火曜日の朝のことだ
"It happened one Tuesday morning."

22. ダーズリー一家が目を覚ますと、外はどんよりとした灰色の空だった
"The sky was a dull grey when the Dursleys woke."

23. 物語はここから始まる
"The story begins here."

24. まか不思議なことがまもなくイギリス中で起ころうとしているなんて、そんな気配は曇り空のどこにもなかった
"There was no sign in the cloudy sky of the bizarre events about to unfold in England."

Well, that's just my take without consulting the original text (although I have of course read it, in English.)

Edit: Okay, I took a peek. I guess it is 'keep the Potters distant', とおざける is literally 遠くへ離れさせる, ie, the definition is causative. Either way it's a metaphor that really means 'be unfriendly toward and avoid contact with' just like the English be distant from / keep at a distance metaphors. And my translation of 19 is totally broken in the context it appears in, although it much the sentiment, it just needs total rewording to grammatically fit as it's not actually an isolated exclamation.

Thanks for that!

I'm pleased you didn't consult the original at first - it's nice to know what a more literal take on the sentences looks like. I'd already been biased by starting with the original English and trying to match it up with the Japanese, so I wanted a fresh view.

I must concede that this really is quite difficult for a beginner... I'm finding the exercise useful, though. It's given me a whole pile of vocab to learn, and some focus for my grammar reading. I'll probably have to settle for 80% understanding at this stage, even with dictionary help. I'll return to the first chapter again, later, when I have better grammar knowledge.

Thanks again.

I'm curious how the OP is doing on Potter. I have the first book in a sort of ebook format and mp3 and I'd like to read along. I've been studying Japanese a little over a year now but only taken 1 semester of actual class... I just finished reading chapter 1 on my own and have about 500ish vocab words I'm working on from it. I plan to learn at least half passively before moving on to chapter 2. I use rikaisama to get me through it... No dual language reading for me.

Btw I tried this about 5 months into Japanese when I only knew grammar from say chapter 1 or 2 of a 1st semester text and found it way too hard. I hope you're faring better.

kraemder Wrote:I'm curious how the OP is doing on Potter.

If he's anything like me when I tried a similar strategy years ago, he's long become bored and frustrated and given up on the project...although hopefully hasn't given up on learning Japanese altogether. That would make this technique even worse than useless.

My experience was similar to pervygoat; it was taking 30 minutes for one sentence and even then I could barely understand it (this was all with paper dictionaries and such, of course). I just don't understand how you can go directly from nothing or from RTK into native materials in the way the OP is trying to do. I've seen people claim it's possible but they never seem to offer any real specifics.