This is a review of the german translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone (the first in the series), which I bought with the aim of making me more fluent in German, to help me with my A level and future degree.

For those of you who don't know the basic story of Harry Potter, he is an orphan living with his aunt and uncle, who finds out on his 11th birthday that he is actually a wizard, and has a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It's a big exciting world filled with danger and enemies, such as the evil Lord Voldemort who killed Harry's parents, though hasn't been seen since that day. This book tells the story of Harry's first year at Hogwarts, with the friends he makes, his subjects and the adventures he has while there.


First of all, I absolutely loved the whole Harry Potter series in English, so when I was deciding what book to buy in German, this was an obvious choice, as I wanted a book that I knew I would like and that would be basic enough to understand. The translation does stick very close to JK Rowling's original, and as far as I can tell, only small things have been changed, such as jokes which wouldn't make sense if literally translated. Having read the book many times in English did help me, because even if I didn't understand very much in a whole page of German, I already knew the plot so it was easy to pick up what was happening when I did understand something again.

All in all, if you don't speak German, then don't buy this book, but that's obvious. However if you do speak quite a lot of German and want to improve fluency and comprehension, then I would recommend this book, as it is a book for children, and as such is not written in overly complex language, and so is relatively easy to understand, especially if you're familiar with the original. Of course if you are fluent in German then you should have no problems.

This book isn't widely available here in the UK, but I ordered mine from Amazon.de and it came within a few days, which surprised and delighted me. Harry Potter is available in something like 200 languages, so if you fancy reading it in a foreign language, you do have a lot of choice. I plan on buying a couple of Harry Potter books in Spanish in the near future, so I'll let you know how I get on with them.