On to chapter 7! Are you still reading along?
We’ll spend 2 weeks on chapter 7, November 23-December 6. The home thread for this bookclub is here .
Who will read Harry Potter chapter 7 now?
I’m reading along
I’m still reading but I haven’t reached this part yet
I’m not participating
0 voters
This chapter’s twelve pages shorter than the one before. It’s almost like taking the week off. 
I found that the long chapters were mostly dialogue, so I’m glad the chapters are shorter and hopefully back to prose. I’m pretty good at reading dialogue; it’s the prose I need to practice.
I wonder why ゴースト uses the English word.
I mean I guess, strictly speaking, they’re English ghosts…
Now you have to write a Japanese HP fanfic, with this sentence in it!
I’m idly curious as to how many Japanese readers realised that ロングボトム basically means 長い尻. (Though etymologically, “Bottom” is a name given to someone who lived at the bottom of a valley - Longbottom is a long valley - but that’s not half as much fun.)
I say. They haven’t even attempted to retain the absolutely random nature of Dumbledore’s “say a few words” speech. He kinda just screeches at them instead.
Yes- that bit made me realise just how reliant I am on characters not just spouting nonsense at each other.
Makes me feel sorry for any Japanese learners who were forced to suddenly contend with:
Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!
I wonder if there’s anything in that translation. My Jisho’ing (prior to remembering that he just says random semi-archaic words) suggested:
there! heave-ho! hey reason! some sort of iron implements-reason! this is all.
So do we think that the translator just took one look at this sentence and decided they weren’t paid enough to deal with it, or is there some cultural meaning…
Weird aside, but if you put verbatim sentences into Google Translate it sometimes takes it upon itself to add character’s first names:
This one is especially incongruous, not only because the katakana clearly says Madam, but because I’m fairly sure her first name isn’t even mentioned in any of the books (let alone in this speech).
ed. the plot thickens, apparently there’s some sort of great fan controversy on her first name even being Rolanda (Madam Hooch - Fanlore)…
Perhaps someone added “Rolanda Hooch” as a translation for マダム・フーチ?
I just checked this, and looks like that’s what happened. マダム・フーチ returns Madam Hooch as a primary translation though
Interesting- I wonder why it chooses Rolanda for that sentence- it must know it was from Harry Potter, specifically.
I should have guessed that Google crowd-sourced the translations, they crowd source everything else 
It’s basically assorted varieties of “heave-ho”, especially those used when hauling around mikoshi and the like at festivals. そーれ, for example, is what they cry at the Kawagoe Matsuri.
Tries to shake mental image of people shouting “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!” at the Kawagoe Matsuri.
Hi everybody 
I just joined WK. I can already speak/read some Japanese, more or less N3, but my reading is far behind my speaking ability, because of kanji. Which is why I dumped my Anki decks and decided to start WK from scratch.
Question: I have my copy of 賢者の石 bedside me (it’s the larger kind of paperback with ふりがな) but every time I started reading it, I dropped it after a couple pages because I had to look up every other word.
What WK level do you think one should reach before picking up this book again? I don’t mind using the dictionary, but it gets annoying if it’s everything I can do. At least with manga you can look at the pictures while you’re typing into a dictionary…
Well… I’m surviving at Level 25 (and Wanikani makes up the majority of my vocabulary at the moment) however:
If I had to have a stab at it I’d say you’d need to be a few levels higher than me without these advantages. But you’d also need an equivalent for non-kanji vocabulary.
So 婦人 has レディ in furigana next to it, how does that work? (This is used in reference to the fat lady at the entrance to Gryffindor’s dorms)
It’s pronounced レディ, lady. The kanji is there so you know what it means. This often happens when you’ve a foreign or made up term in a story, and I’m a big fan! 
Or sometimes you’ll find it when there’s some ambiguity. I’m reading 黒執事 right now, and there’s a lot of cases where the furigana isn’t simply the reading of the kanji. For example the furigana may say こいつら, with the kanji giving the information who is actually being referred to by that.
So, in short: What’s actually being said is the furigana, but there’s information given to the reader as to what is meant through the kanji used as well.
I have always wondered about that and which bit I should be ‘reading’. Thank you!
