Reading Harry Potter in Spanish

Let’s have a look through the first two paragraphs in the Spanish version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and see what we learn

Reading books in Spanish is a brilliant way to improve your language skills. Even the bare minimum will help to increase your comprehension skills, your vocabulary and your understanding of grammatical structures.

Let’s have a read through the first couple of paragraphs in the first Harry Potter book.

In English, the first Harry Potter book is called “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” or “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” if you’re in the USA, but in Spanish, it’s called “Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal”.

The word “piedra” means “stone” or “rock”, and it’s actually where the name “Pedro” or, in English, “Peter” comes from. In the bible, Saint Peter was called the Rock.

The word “filosofal” is an adjective meaning “philosophical”.

Let’s start with “Capítulo Uno” or “Chapter One”.

The boy who lived

El niño que sobrevivió — “the boy who lived” or literally “the boy that lived”

The noun “niño” simply means “boy” or “child”. The feminine is “niña”, which means “girl”. In Spanish, if you’re talking about a noun in general terms, you tend to use the masculine. In English, we often have a separate word for talking about things in general:

boy — girl — children
niño — niña — niños

brother — sister — siblings
hermano — hermana — hermanos

mother — father — parents
madre — padre — padres

Then, you have the word “que”. The word “que”, in Spanish, has a multitude of meanings, but in this instance, it means “that”. In English, we very often use the word “who” instead of “that” if we’re talking…