The school year at Hogwarts starts on September 1st. Let’s start the school year by reading ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石 (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone)!
CDJapan has the physical book, and Kobo has the eBook. Honto seems to have it too. Amazon Japan has both the pysical book and the eBook. US Amazon also has both the physical book and the eBook.
We’ll read 1 chapter per 2 weeks, and the schedule looks like this:
Intriguing. Might be interesting to read something that was translated into Japanese rather than out of it. And I should be just about free of my other entanglements by September, if all goes well.
I have a first edition copy of Philsopher’s Stone in Japanese, it’s such a prized possession. I’ve also got the full collection of the carry-sized books (bunkoban???), the audio version, and the Kindle version. So yes, I am in.
I’m nowhere near the right level in terms of grammar and vocab, but I’m up for the challenge and I certainly know the material well enough to bumble through!
I know, but I think it’s honestly a little above our level for many of us. Therefore 2 weeks per chapter could be good. It will also be easier to catch up if someone falls behind.
If you know the story, it’s a lot easier! I feel like it was translated almost sentence by sentence, so you could even do a side by side comparison! (It’s been a while since I read the original, though.)
floflo.moe has the Harry Potter 1 word list available for free.
You can either generate the full list and scroll along as you read (it will of course only display a new word once), and / or you can SRS words of a chosen frequency beforehand or during reading.
So for example, you can spend the next month and a half SRSing the words that appear more than 5ish times in the book.
It’s also on the new version of floflo, koohi.cafe, but be warned that koohi didn’t get around to implementing password recovery. So record your log-in stuff well if you want to use that one. And due to personal reasons of the creator, neither websites are currently being actively supported. Just so anyone interested knows what they’re getting into.
I tried to read HP1 when I was early on in my Japanese journey. It was far too hard for me, and just such a chore to get through that I dropped it very fast. I read the first two chapters recently and now it’s not really a problem grammar-wise, but I still bump into quite some vocab I don’t actively know. But my extensive knowledge of the original means I can infer a lot of words from memory.
I’m reading it right now. There is furigiana on most of the kanji. Any that don’t have it are either super basic kanji, or they occasionally omit furigana on kanji they’ve shown it on recently to help you remember them.
Already had seen the movies a few times.