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Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an amazing way to improve your knowledge of a foreign language. When I started reading French novels, I could mostly understand maybe 60% and guess another 30%. But after 10,000 pages, I was only running into unknown words every few pages, and my understanding of idioms was vastly better. The same thing works for listening comprehension: Find a DVD box set of easy TV series, one where you can understand maybe…
A Hungarian friend learned German with Star Trek The Next Generation this way.
Yeah, probably a third of my (arguably limited) German vocabulary comes from watching Star Trek at Sat.1.
Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
#33Off topic: I have been reading Harry Potter in French as my gateway to French literature. My love for French actually started with The Count of Monte Cristo which made want to learn French just so as to read the original Le Comte de Monte-Cristo . Obviously, my French (starting from zero) a mere year or so later isn't good enough to read something like Alexandre Dumas' masterpiece, but I figured if I started with a b…
The best part about Harry Potter in French is that the word for wand is "baguette".
The word for wand is always "baguette"... Why is that the best part? I guess I must be missing some reference.
Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
#34OMG, this is so cool. I have the translatio in linguam Latinam “Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis”, done by Peter Needham. If only my ancient Greek weren't that bad, I would enjoy this endlessly. The latin version is full of shrewd and imaginative adaptations of the good old lingua to our modern (and magical) times. If the greek version is anything like that (and how could it manage otherwise?), then this is apt to be highly addictive poison :) Wouldn't you like a chocolate frog?
Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best part about Harry Potter in French is that the word for wand is "baguette".
The word for wand is always "baguette"... Why is that the best part? I guess I must be missing some reference.
Well, to me wands are sticks of wood that are used for magic and baguettes are loaves of bread.
Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
#36From the Amazon product page: > Age Range: 12 - 17 years This might be more relevant if HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE had a code for Ancient Greek.
ISO 639-2 defines "grc" for Ancient Greek. But I couldn't find a specification for HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE.
Going by the language tag best practices every program should accept 3 letter language codes if it also accepts 2 letter language codes. But with software, you never know.
Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
#37Oh god, they transliterated the name "Harry Potter" to "Άρειος Ποτήρ", which pretty much means "aryan cup"! I'm dying over here.
Are Greek surnames commonly profession words? I'm wondering how plausibly they could have just translated "potter" as the profession term, and whether a clay pot would be a ποτήρ or something else.
Sometimes they are, yes, but I don't know if it would fit. I like the existing translation a lot, though.
Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
#38Off topic: I have been reading Harry Potter in French as my gateway to French literature. My love for French actually started with The Count of Monte Cristo which made want to learn French just so as to read the original Le Comte de Monte-Cristo . Obviously, my French (starting from zero) a mere year or so later isn't good enough to read something like Alexandre Dumas' masterpiece, but I figured if I started with a b…
I love novels as a language learning tool, so much in fact that I've created a web-app with a reading interface to help people who enjoy learning in this way:
It allows you to:
1. upload an entire novel
2. translate the words and phrases you don't know
3. review them later with spaced-repetition flashcards containing the original context sentence
Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
#39Off topic: I have been reading Harry Potter in French as my gateway to French literature. My love for French actually started with The Count of Monte Cristo which made want to learn French just so as to read the original Le Comte de Monte-Cristo . Obviously, my French (starting from zero) a mere year or so later isn't good enough to read something like Alexandre Dumas' masterpiece, but I figured if I started with a b…
The best part about Harry Potter in French is that the word for wand is "baguette".
Baguette threw us badly, watching Deathly Hallows in French (audio + subtitles, at suggestion of a language teacher)
Re: Harry Potter in Ancient Greek
#40Off topic: I have been reading Harry Potter in French as my gateway to French literature. My love for French actually started with The Count of Monte Cristo which made want to learn French just so as to read the original Le Comte de Monte-Cristo . Obviously, my French (starting from zero) a mere year or so later isn't good enough to read something like Alexandre Dumas' masterpiece, but I figured if I started with a b…
Hah! I used the first Harry Potter novel as an audiobook to help improve my ability to understand spoken French. There are phrases that I use even today, nearly 15 years later, that I learned from listening to that novel over and over and over again in my car. I think I must have played through it nearly 100 times.
As an aside, French literature pretty much sucks - don't kill yourself to get to the point where you can read Dumas or Zola in the original, it isn't really worth the effort (although I do have a bit of a soft spot for Maupassant, and French poetry is absolutely wonderful).