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Off 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 book I've literally read dozens of times in English that I always know what the next sentence will say, well, that would be a good place to start.

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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 40% of the dialog, and just start watching. It's OK to use a good dub of a series you've already watched. Repeat this with, say, 5 series and you'll see an amazing boost in listening comprehension. TV series are usually better than films for this exercise, because they'll give you 50+ hours of mostly the same people speaking about a limited set of topics, which helps a lot in the beginning.

It seems like the brain is very good at upgrading partial comprehension to nearly complete comprehension. But the trick is getting to an enjoyable level of partial comprehension.

There is a technique called "Listening-Reading" that's fairly well known within the language-learning community.

The idea is straight-forward:

Get a novel-length text in your target language, a high-quality recording of that text and a literal translation of the text in your native language. Alternate between reading the original text and the translation while simultaneously listening to the recording.

The method is supposedly fantastic, but it's incredibly difficult to gather suitable materials. While widely-translated books like Harry Potter seem ideal, the translations are not literal and occasionally the audiobooks do not match the texts exactly.

Further info:

http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_Met...

http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!%20L-R%20th...

They have interlinear translations of lots of religious texts (and surely also audiobook recordings. But religious texts are not everyone's favourite reading material.

Thanks for the links! I'm going to try this out with French.

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.

I liked to watch subtitled shows for this reason. I seem to pick up words as I go. Nouns seem to be the easiest to figure out, followed by adjectives and verbs, but this might vary depending on just how those words get morphed by the grammar in some languages.

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:

http://readlang.com

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

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.

Because in English "Baguette" is a french long thin bread loaf. The idea of people walking around waving loaves of bread is funny.

Well, to me wands are sticks of wood that are used for magic and baguettes are loaves of bread.

Baguette does in fact mean rod, wand or baton - the bread related usage only dates from 1920 if Wikipedia is to be believed. Go to Google translate and put in “magic wand” and you’ll get “baguette magique” as the French equivalent, with “baguette” alone as an alternative.

Baguette threw us badly, watching Deathly Hallows in French (audio + subtitles, at suggestion of a language teacher)

I've read the Count of Monte Cristo in English, which is basically my native language and I wouldn't be embarrassed to say that my skills aren't good enough to even read that book's English translation. It's not just the English, it's all the book's references to previous literature, ancient and otherwise, as well as French history.

I am a firm believer that one should spend at least 10 or 20 years learning French and then read Les Miserables and Le Compte de Monte-Cristo.

The same could be said about La sombra del viento, 100 años de soledad or Neruda's poems in Spanish.

In English, only Virginia Woolf inspires the same awe for language that these other books impregnated in me.

In some sense, these authors don't use words. They let words use them.

> I am a firm believer that one should spend at least 10 or 20 years learning French and then read Les Miserables and Le Compte de Monte-Cristo.

Sure do that. But no harm in reading these two books a few times before that, too.

Sure no harm in that. Also, some translations are really great, and you can sense the style of the original authors through them. Yet, there is something about those particular books that just has to be said in their respective language. Not because the message is lost, but a part of their magic will always be bound to the words used, I guess

> The same could be said about La sombra del viento, 100 años de soledad or Neruda's poems in Spanish.

That's a surprising choice. Most Spanish readers would say that La sombra del viento is nowhere near an undisputable masterpiece such as 100 años de soledad, or even Neruda's poems (the literary stature of which is perhaps more contested).

It is not a masterpiece.

In terms of use of language, it is just really that good. Neruda and Garcia Marquez are Nobel winners, and they are obviously better literally speaking. But the dude that wrote La sombre del viento knows how to use Spanish to describe beautiful sceneries and moments.

Also, keep in mind that this is my subjective view on things.

What about Shakespeare, Melville or Hemingway?

Hemingway gets me there too, now that my English doesn't suck. Shakespeare is just really, really funny. Much ado about nothing is my favourite comedy.

Other plays like Hamlet, MacBeth, humble me. Same thing with Cervantes. Those guys pretty much redefined language and I don't think I have read enough to understand them. Maybe someday?

Harry Potter was the first book I read in English because I was familiar with it since I had read it a few times in French. It was a great learning experience.

I'm doing the same exact thing in Spanish right now! I've just finished Harry Potter y La Camara de Los Secretos :)

I use comics , in the case of french Asterix or Tintin , as easier but you can go with more difficult ones, the french don't lack of good comics. And then i begin with books.

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).

+1 but for Roald Dahl in Italian.

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