Harry Potter and the Dutch Practice

Dutch cover of the first Harry Potter bookI’ve been reading Harry Potter in Dutch lately. Well, actually, I’ve been attempting to read Harry Potter in Dutch since Christmas, when I got the book, but actually being in the Netherlands has improved both my motivation and my actual ability.

To say I’m reading it might be exaggerating a bit though. Normally, when I read Dutch, I have to spend a lot of time looking up unfamiliar words and staring at sentence structures until I figure out where the verb is. I’m not bothering with Harry Potter, which means tons of unfamiliar words get lost – if I can’t figure it out from context, I just skim ahead until the next scene where I know what’s supposed to be going on and can try again. So it’s slow going, and I miss a lot of the details.

I saw a quote on the internet the other day, which Google tells me is from Charlemagne: “To have another language is to possess a second soul.” And no one could say that I ‘have’ Dutch, not by a long shot, but this came to mind during the scene I was reading last night.

I’ve just finished the chapter where Harry is on the train, and all the first-years go across the lake on little boats and see the castle for the first time. My Dutch class left me utterly unprepared for reading something like this. Our vocabulary tended to be about things like clothing shops and train stations; descriptions of a magical lake and its surroundings never made the word list for some reason. So they got on the little boats, and I understood that because I know the word for boat, and then some stuff happened, and I could not begin to tell you what it was, and then they come around a corner or something and see the castle.

Again, my textbook left me woefully unprepared for describing a castle, but I picked up enough – “torens en torentjes,” (towers and turrets), “ramen die fonkelend” (windows that glowed), “sterrenhemel” (starry heavens.) I’d never seen any of those words before, but I could figure them out, and it was enough to pull to mind an image that I’ve had in my head since I first read the book when I was 10, and that made me really happy.

So last weekend at the flea market I bought the second book in Dutch, and I’m planning to buy the rest of them. If having another language is having a second soul, than having all of the Harry Potter books in another language might be kind of the same thing.

One comment on “Harry Potter and the Dutch Practice
  1. That’s so cool! I’m Dutch but I’ve only read all the books in English (though I’ve heard the Dutch translations are really good). I’ve been trying to read the first book in Chinese though, so I think I understand the confusion and triumph when you get to the same images in the different language : )
    [I saw your comment on tumblr, glad the English bits helped : ) Good luck with the Dutch lessons!]

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