My story: Reading the Harry Potter books in a new language
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My story: Reading the Harry Potter books in a new language

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In this post, I want to share with you my journey of starting to read books in a foreign language. I have come up with different strategies that have worked well for me, and I will share some tips for anyone who´s interested (but I realize this will be too long if I do it in this post, so I am going to post a Part 2). This story will be about when I first started reading books in Spanish, which happens to be the Harry Potter books! Enjoy!

So, I feel like I should start with this. A lot of people (youtubers for example) are very loud about how much they think you "need" to understand in order to actually get something out of reading a book in another language. I found this very discouraging and also not true. I would never be where I am today with my Spanish if I would have listened to that.

Okay, so let´s start from the beginning. I started studying Spanish in school. I didn´t really put in much effort or interest in it the first year (my life was also pretty messy at the time). Then summer came along and I found myself a bit bored. So, naturally, I throught "Hey, why not read Harry Potter in Spanish!". Obviously, no one thought I would actually succeed in doing that (or make it through the first two pages for that matter), especially not after only a year of some high school Spanish classes. So I did the only thing I could think of. I proved them wrong.

It would be unfair not to tell you that I have read the Harry Potter books before, in both Swedish and English, and I knew the story very very well at this point (I still do). This was part of the plan, and it helped me tremendously with my learning. When I first started reading the first Harry Potter book in Spanish, I only understood a couple of words per page. But my brain very quickly picked up common words, such as "glasses", "scar", "wizard", "owl", etc, etc. And with the most common words down, I could now understand a lot more of what was going on, which helped me to learn even more words, and even more after that. I finished the first Harry Potter book in Spanish in only two weeks! I was soo happy and proud that I made it, this was the first thing I ever read in Spanish!

I continued with the series, but when I came to the third book, I started to get discouraged. Summer vacation was over and school had started. It consumed all of my energy. Suddenly, reading the book felt like a chore. I took a break over a couple of months (I only read a little at this time). Then it started to get better again, and I finished the next books in the series very quickly (it took 2-6 weeks each, but they are huuge). It went better than I ever could have dreamed of.

When I was on the last book, it was early summer and I was lying in my grandparents hammock, reading about The Battle of Hogwarts, when I suddenly realised something. When reading, I didn´t even think about the fact that I was reading in Spanish! I didn´t notice I was reading at all, the story just happened and I was part of it. It was the coolest feeling ever, reading about the Battle of Hogwarts in Spanish, while the sun was slowly going down over the horizon.

I went from only knowing a couple of words on every page, to get everything of what was going on in the story. I am very grateful that I never gave up, because this journey laid the foundation on which I continued building on.

Thank you for reading.

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