Should you Read Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings in Japanese?
Despite a nearly unlimited amount of Japanese books to choose from, you’d be surprised how often I get asked this question. It usually comes from people at an intermediate level that want to make their first attempt into novels.
Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings are two of the most popular novel series ever. The appeal is there. You read them in English and love them. You know the story so well that you don’t have to worry about following along or getting lost, regardless of the language. What more perfect a source of motivation?
But is using these two series a good idea?
An initial negative reaction to pursuing these books in Japanese can be:
You are learning Japanese – read a real Japanese book.
-Some Japanese learner purist
In an ideal world, it would be amazing if you instantly and effortlessly found books at your level that you love, that also seriously fired up your learning energy. But since this is rarely reality, Japanese translations (and dubs) play an important role. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings lead the pack with this.
The initial benefits are obvious:
- These series are translated into full natural Japanese and are even given a Japanese feel to them through the creative language employed.
- It gets you reading novels in Japanese and this is so important.
- It builds your confidence in reading real Japanese.
- It lets you focus on enjoyment without obsessing over every detail. It’s easy to get caught up in the fear of missing out on a plot, which causes people to use subtitles or translation. This is a real struggle that people have when they try to watch their favorite anime without subtitles for the first time. They don’t want to miss a single moment.
- It’s an incredible feeling to read your favorite non-Japanese series in Japanese.
- It will introduce you to a wide range of colorful and advanced vocabulary.
So much positive. What could go wrong?
Both Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings are really hard reads in Japanese – even when you know the stories inside out. Getting stuck in difficult Japanese is not fun, and can be extremely frustrating. And I can’t stress enough – difficult is an understatement.
While Harry Potter starts off as a simple story, and becomes more complex throughout later books, the Japanese is still challenging from page 1. You’ll come across tons of words you’ve never heard of and usually never see. You’ll be given strange dialects added to characters. It’s an uphill battle. Lord of the Rings? Take everything I just said and multiply it several times over. Add in more classical dialects, never-ending meticulous descriptions and insane kanji usage.
The biggest problem with choosing any novel to read is finding the right balance for your current level. People underestimate these two series way too much.
When should you use them?
You are focusing on the positives of these series and have decided you need them. You know you aren’t going to start them from day 1, but when is the right time? I saw a Ted Talk recently about a polyglot who used Harry Potter to help her learn a foreign language. Right from the beginning, she would look up the words she didn’t know to progress.
Attempting this might work for some languages (ex. a native English speaker learning Spanish). But not Japanese. If you are going to use these 2 sources, at a bare minimum you should be at least high intermediate for Harry Potter, and an advanced level for Lord of the Rings. It’s a strange situation because if you are already this level, then you don’t need series like these, as your options have quite expanded…
Have you read Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings in Japanese?
I read all 7 Harry Potter books at a high intermediate level and crashed and burned through half of the Fellowship of the Rings shortly after that (vowing never to return to it again).
What was your experience? When did you attempt them? How’d it go?
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
While Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in Japanese was not hugely difficult for me (and gave me a lot of fun sentences to add to my flashcards) I could barely get through the first chapter or so of The Hobbit. Even though I’m a massive fan of LoTR, I can’t even imagine what it must be like reading the trilogy in Japanese.
Harry Potter will definitely provide some fun vocabulary. LOTR made me wonder sometimes hmm… will I need to ever know this specific type of axe?
I listen to Harry Potter and study the text along side (I haven’t got very far). There are a lot of words that Mr dursley uses that are strange to me and my Japanese tutor warned me that his speech is quite vulgar (which is different from the English Mr Dursley). So there’s a trap for the unwary too.
You bring up a good point though that using Harry Potter as a listening resource (instead of reading the novel) is another possible alternative.
Hagrid is also given a very different dialect.
I’m extremely familiar with Harry Potter in English from my growing up years, and I began reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in Japanese basically upon finishing RTK. I didn’t understand very much, but I understood enough from kanji meanings and known backing context from previous familiarity to be entertained for a while. I read a few chapters but eventually got kinda lost/bored and moved to other things. I definitely recommend attempting it early and often to any Japanese learner who has kanji knowledge and an understanding of the HP universe; even though I didn’t finish, it gave me a lot of good exposure I almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten so early otherwise, and I enjoyed it in the moment. I expect it’d be a slog for anyone who isn’t familiar at least until mid-intermediate though.
I attempted reading The Hobbit and LotR in English when I was a teen; I finished The Hobbit, but thought it was totally boring, and I didn’t survive a chapter of LotR (especially after how bored I was reading The Hobbit). Given that experience, I can’t say I’ve ever had any urge to give them a shot in Japanese.
If you didn’t like LOTR in English, then yes, you most definitely won’t like it in Japanese :)
I have thought about doing this but my series is/was The Wheel of Time. I thought about it a little differently though. I really wanted to find the audiobook and use it for semi-background or in-car immersion. I wonder if that changes the equation at all to make it more accessible.
P.S. I don’t think there is an Japanese audiobook for The Wheel of Time (though of course there is for HP & LOTR). If anyone knows otherwise let me know!
I did a quick check and couldn’t find The Wheel of Time on any of the Jp audio-book sites. Not sure how popular the series is in Japan.
Thanks for checking!
I guess people give Harry Potter in particular a try because it’s “for kids” but when I tried to read Philosopher’s Stone in Korean at a lower intermediate level I couldn’t get past the first page, even without the issue of having to look up Kanji. I would definitely agree an upper intermediate would be more suited to the series and even then you’ll probably regularly have to look up words. After all, some of the most used words in the books like wizard, sorcery, magical spells, etc are hardly common words in English either.
And as previous mentioned, the language you are studying will make the series more or less accessible. I could probably stumble through the book with my mid-range beginner Spanish easier than I could with my much higher level (when compared to Spanish)Korean or Japanese.
Yeah, trying to read books because they are “for kids” can lead to disappointment and increasing self-doubt (I can’t even read a book for kids?!)
I found a blog a while ago from a guy who would search for the best foreign language books that seemed to have fallen off the radar, and his method of learning languages was to sit there with a book and learn it word by word, sentence by sentence and then read the book 3 times over. Personally I could never do that, but it seemed to work well for him as he could read fluently in at least 6 or 7 languages.
However, when I was learning Russian a couple years ago, I spoke with a professor who told me how Tolstoy was great for people learning Russian as Tolstoy wrote descriptions of places and people in a “fairy tale” way, using the same descriptions every single time he mentioned them. Tolkien is celebrated for his intricate and visceral descriptions, but I think part of that is breaking from the traditional fairy tale format of reusing descriptions. Iirc that sort of style came about because it was easier to remember the descriptions in that way (ancient srs?) so it may be worth looking for translated fairy tales since those should both be easy reads and designed to be easily remembered.
Yeah, I also don’t think I could ever do a method like that. But that’s cool that it works for him. I do think it may be harder with a language like Japanese though.
Very interesting about Tolstoy being a great source for learning Russian.
I don’t recommend you learning Japanese from the Harry Potter series.
Because the Japanese version of the Harry Potter Series has many mistranslations, Japanese misuse, and vocabulary that is no longer used.
The reason this happened is that the person who translated the Harry Potter Series into Japanese was originally an interpreter of lectures on Japanese culture, history and society.
Moreover, since she is the president of a small publishing company, there is little possibility of improving sentences with many misuses of Japanese.
The translator hasn’t changed even in the recently released “新装版 (new edition)”.