Harry Potter en Español

Grant, we were talking earlier in the show about that point in your life as a child when you hear words and you don’t realize that they have more than one meaning or you’re not quite sure what they mean.

Right.

The cool thing about learning another language is that you get placed in that same childlike state.

And a few years ago when the Harry Potter books came out, I was learning Spanish.

And my Spanish wasn’t too good, but it was pretty good, good enough to read Harry Potter very, very slowly.

And I knew that the word lechuga meant lettuce.

What I didn’t realize was that the word lechuza means owl.

And so for the first several chapters of reading Harry Potter, I was reading and thinking that these flying heads of lettuce were delivering messages to Harry and his friends.

Which in a magical world is possible.

Yeah, which made perfect sense.

And so I’m thinking, boy, this is some fantasy story.

Nice.

So I was chastened and had to go back and read those over again.

But that’s one of the joys, isn’t it, of learning a second language is when you screw up like that.

Misunderstanding of language can be hilarious.

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