NPCR and Harry Potter

[renzhe]

good work, Trisha, and 加油!

Don't worry about reading children's stuff, I started with this

The most important thing is that the material is challenging, but not overwhelming. That's the best way to learn. If you keep it up, you'll be reading Jin Yong in no time

[Mouseneb]

Actually, I didn't read the other HP books in Chinese first. I happen to have an English copy of HP6 in my house and so I picked that one so I can double check the English version when I get truly confused. I've found a few places where I'm fairly sure they've mistranslated a bit - I think the online version I'm reading is a 山寨 translation done on the fly before the official Chinese translation came out. It's kind of fun to see - sometimes they stick in a little editor's note about a bit that might be confusing to the Chinese reading audience.

[atitarev]

I am very glad someone is trying to read Harry Potter in Chinese. Unfortunately, I haven't finished the 1st chapter (same with Japanese). The reason was I thought I could find an audio-book for it but failed. Reading parallel texts (Chinese and English) is fun. I am reading a girl's comics - NANA (in Chinese: 娜娜) ( again) translated into Chinese but I have Japanese and Chinese versions to help me, although I am reading with some difficulty the Japanese version as well. Somehow this comics appeals to me.

I won't commit to anything to avoid future embarrassment but I'd like to see the progress of this reading. I may restart HP. No, it's not so easy and I'm almost done with NPCR 4.

Edited October 15, 2009 at 02:09 AM by atitarev

[trisha2766]

I probably won't start trying to read Harry Potter until I've at least started NPCR4. I've got a few other children's story books from China Sprout I'll read first and I think I might order some of the Chinese Breeze series. People here seem to like them and I'm guessing they would be a bit easier than Harry Potter to start with. And shorter.

[atitarev]

I've been recommending Graded Chinese Reader review (both volumes are very good). In this thread Graded Chinese Reader and Chinese Breeze are compared.

[Yukamina]

I can't seem to view the PEP Yuwen books online. I can browse the website, but when I click on a section of a book to look at, the page doesn't work.

[querido]

Well, it requires javascript. Do you have that enabled?

[trisha2766]

For me I noticed there were some days and times that the pages had difficulty loading. It might be easier if you try when its night in China, if you can do that.

[Bethany]

I did some analysis on the Chinese Harry Potter book. They were much too hard for me, but I wrote a program that picked out easy quotes (short sentances containing common characters) and that was much more approachable. I know the story well enough that I don't mind having it out of order!

 

However, the difficulty did increase reasonably rapidly. To slow things down, I gave Twilight the same treatment. Turns out that despite being almost twice as long, Twilight has just much smaller vocabulary— just over half the characters in total. Plus, being written in first person and a more casual tone seemed more useful than the Harry Potter style. 

 

So, if you decide Harry Potter is too hard, maybe try Twilight. If you liked the English version, I mean, I know a lot of people aren't interested.