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I got my hands on an audiobook of “Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen” (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) recently, and even found a copy of the book in hardback at the library! Sometimes I read, sometimes I read and listen at the same time, and sometimes, when I’m very tired, I just listen. I am astonished at how much I understand! Knowing the story well helps, of course, and I can guess a lot of the unknown words by context, and, when I feel like it, I look some of them up on http://www.dict.cc/. For instance, a lovely new word for me is “Gehwegplatten” . At Flourish & Blotts there were leather-bound books as big as “Gehwegplatten”. It means “flagstones”. Isn’t that delightful? It’s like “Go-way-plates”! I’ll never forget that word now.

I’ve also got a library copy of Winnie the Pooh in German (Pu der Bär), and Elli reads chapters to me sometimes, but it’s much, much harder to understand, even though I also know those stories by heart. I think Harry must be a lot more simplistic than Pooh in plot, vocabulary, and sentence structure. That’s not really a very big surprise, though, is it?