On using Harry Potter as a tool for learning languages

To learn Latin, I read as much as I possibly can. During meals, I read. Often the first thing I do in the morning is glance through something on Latin Library on my phone as the water for my tea boils. As an undergraduate I sometimes spent up to eight hours a day (or entire nights, when I couldn’t sleep) reading Latin and obsessively writing every new word or turn in phrase first in my diary, then in Anki, a spaced repetition software. I gained my quite extensive Latin vocabulary by reading words and phrases in context then memorizing them, which in turn allowed me to speak, write, and aurally comprehend quite well.

However, this is not how I was encouraged to learn Italian. The suggestion was always to speak to as many people as possible. This is fair, especially when the goal is to be able to speak the language. However, I could not exactly learn many words that way, at least not without constantly stopping in the middle of the conversation to ask for definitions or take notes. The problem with doing so is that at the first sign of confusion, everyone switches to English, preventing me from ever learning. Even my bad accent is enough to get people in shops to speak exclusively English, particularly in tourist-heavy cities, something I find extremely irritating and often find myself arguing about with people. Everyone complains that English speakers just want to speak English everywhere; the truth is, unless we eliminate our accents, people speak to us in English regardless of whether we actually want to. I would love to learn as many languages as possible, but that requires cooperation from native speakers. “Just talk to people” is not as easy as it sounds. Also, to “just talk to people” you already need to know a few thousand vocabulary words and a fair amount of grammar, something that the courses I took weren’t enough to give me.

For this reason, while attending university courses in Italian, I decided to try reading and listening to podcasts to gain a wider vocabulary. I managed to find an interesting enough podcast about Latin which, amusingly, even interviewed a friend of mine one. I got into Alessandro Barbero. I picked up some Elena Ferrante paperbacks, among other things that seemed to be popular and, thus, potential conversation-starters with my Italian classmates. This was, however, somewhat slow and tiresome because so many words needed to be looked up and, not knowing the plot beforehand, I found myself getting lost too easily. That’s when I decided to try reading Harry Potter in Italian translation.

As a child, like many people of my generation, I read Harry Potter so many times I practically memorized it. As an eight-year-old I begged my parents for British editions of the whole series so that I could compare the spelling and vocabulary differences like a tiny, insane philologist. While I hadn’t reread the books since the last movie came out, I hadn’t needed to; I know them far too well. Harry Potter was also my first, dubious introduction to Latin, in the form of phrases like “exspecto patronum!” It seems I had semi-memorized the text itself. If only I had learned Latin and read Cicero at that age! This provided an excellent advantage when I began trying to read the books in Italian.

Although I certainly did need to look up some words, I remembered the story and even individual passages well enough that I was able to read much more quickly. Often, I used the dictionary more to check than anything. Sillier, fantasy words like “lupo mannaro“(werewolf) were obvious from context and so often repeated that I didn’t need to create Anki cards to learn them. Particularly in the early books, the prose is quite repetitive, as befits a story written for children; this, too, is an advantage for language learners.

Another advantage of the Harry Potter books is that they function somewhat as grader readers. The earliest books are for younger children, while the last few are thematically and otherwise more advanced. This, too, allowed me to slowly work up to more difficult prose in Italian. Reading the later books required a lot more dictionary work, but I have learned a lot. Listening to the books, too, often while reading, seems to have given me a better mental model of Italian, albeit Italian as spoken by fictional British people in a very British context, which makes me much more confident and free in speaking, while also helping me remember phrases that really do come in handy. The only real problem is the appearance of fictional or comedic phrases that I don’t always realize are jokes, such as “fuori di zucca” which appears to be a comic play on “fuori di testa” (“out of one’s mind”) and the perennial Wizarding World fixation on pumpkins (“zucca”), at least according to an Italian friend who claims “fuori di zucca” is not a real phrase. My understanding is that “zucca” can mean “head,” just not in this phrase.

Overall, reading Harry Potter in translation has helped me improve my vocabulary and reading skills, by provided a useful form of input for me, at least, i.e. someone who grew up reading Harry Potter in English. I would recommend this for anyone trying to learn to better read a second language who also grew up reading Harry Potter. If you didn’t, perhaps you could find whatever children’s books you grew up reading in your target language, ideally in both book and audiobook form. I would especially suggest finding a paper copy of whatever book you choose so you can underline words or phrases to be learned.

Of course, one needs to have a native speaker check and make sure the translation is a good one.

This is why I am disappointed by the Latin translation of Harry Potter. The author, Peter Needham, was clearly a very learned man but he appears to be operating under the assumption that children reading Harry Potter in Latin will not be reading in the sense of looking at the page and understanding, but translating word-for-word into English. Apparently for that reason, he has translated so literally that the books lacks the proper Latin idiom. While this does make translating significantly easier, I do not feel that this is pedagogically useful in the long term. In my opinion, this does not help the student learn Latin but gives them instead peculiar, English mistakes that must later be unlearned. Still, I understand why he did this and sympathize with it. Translating English children’s literature into Latin is also quite a difficult and time-consuming task. The fact that he took the time to do so to at all is quite impressive.