Chapter 12! Have you found any big differences between the English and the Japanese version?
We’ll spend 2 weeks on chapter 12, February 15-28. The home thread for this bookclub is here .
Who will read Harry Potter chapter 12 now?
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Heh, I was actually just wondering when this thread was going to show up. 
I’m still a bit amused that the Mirror of Erised is called みぞの = のぞみ spelt backwards.
Why, did you think of a better word to use?
Uh, no. Amused, not bemused.
Yeah, I got that, I just didn’t think it was that funny when I read it. And I thought maybe you thought it was a silly choice.
I don’t think I ever noticed that Erised spells desire backwards…
I got to my favourite line in English, and I love the Japanese translation too. P292 when Harry and Ron wake up on Christmas day.
「ねぇ、これ見てくれる？プレゼントがある」
「ほかに何があるっていうの。大根なんて置いてあったってしょうがないだろ？」
I did find myself wondering if that was an expression; but my attempts at googling suggests that it’s unique to Harry Potter 
Well - the Mirror of Erised has defeated Google…
Interestingly in my English copy of the book the words aren’t just backwards but also spaced incorrectly:
Erised stra ehru oyt ube carfru oyt on wohsi.
Consequently years since reading it originally, this is the first time I haven’t just discarded that sentence magical-pseudo-latin.
Everything can defeat Google. It does seem to like swords, though.
Mine is like that too. Probably they all are. I’m kind of intrigued that the Japanese one is spaced at all. Mine’s also got an asterisk reading 逆から読む, just to hammer the point home.
Muspi merol…
I wonder if it’s just too hard, without the spaces, to work out what’s going on in Japanese, with all the homonyms.
Pff. The P on Percy’s jumper has gone from being “P for Prefect” to 監督生のP, and my first thought was “… what? No part of 監督生 has a P.”
I jumped ahead in my reading to Chap 12 to “catch up” with you guys…
I LOVE how creepy the library is with the foreign languages and the creepy whispering book–ugh!
I looked at that bit about getting a radish. In the UK, naughty children get a lump of coal in their stocking…a radish totally sounds like a Japanese equivalent present that would not be enjoyed… But I also was unable to find support for this theory.
I loved that all of the gang had a big snowball fight. Also, when I read this in English before knowing the series, I did not catch that he got the cloak from an un-named friend of his parents. I suspect now that it is the same guy who loaned Hagrid the オートバイ in Chapter 1, which we will in later books learn is Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black.
The line in the English book is “What did you expect, turnips?”, so the use of “daikon” is not an attempt to translate an English cultural thing into a Japanese cultural thing, but just an English vegetable into a Japanese vegetable.
I don’t think expecting turnips is a specific British Christmas thing, but more just a standard use of hyperbole, along the lines of “so what am I, chopped liver?”.
Smallish spoiler, but: I’m pretty sure we find out later in this book who gave Harry the cloak.
