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Helping improve your English. © Marc Jones 2014-2022

Harry Potter Still Helps Your English

18 July 2014 by Marc

Books

I know that the books are no longer new but there are still ways that Harry Potter can help your English study. You can learn new words and get familiar with different styles of English.

It starts quite easy and gets more difficult

Just as Harry’s challenges are easy at the start and more difficult toward the end, the first two books are very easy to read (the first twenty pages of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone may be tricky because they are filled with new, magical vocabulary) and they get more and more difficult as you progress. They never get extremely difficult, though, so they are an excellent choice of book for your study. The videos are also great listening practice, too.

The magical vocabulary helps you guess from context

I’ve written before about how you don’t need to use your dictionary for every single unknown word you see. Excellent examples of this are ‘muggle’, ‘Death Eaters’ and more. When your confidence is built up with the magical vocabulary, you will also be able to guess useful vocabulary from context too.

There is a mixture of different levels of formality

The way that the teachers address the students is usually very formal, and in Professor Snape’s case even cold. The students at Hogwarts speak very informally to one another, and Hagrid usually speaks very informally, too. There are even old-fashioned styles of English as well, because…

There are different examples of different kinds of text

There are a lot of letters, newspaper articles, diaries, textbooks, celebrity biography and more in the Harry Potter series. Knowing these styles of writing helps you read real texts even faster when you see them.

It prepares you for reading other English novels

If you liked Harry Potter you might like some of these books:

  • Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
  • Bram Stoker – Dracula
  • Benjamin Lebert – Crazy (Translated from German)
  • C.S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia
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Posted in: Input, Listening, Reading Tagged: book, books, films, formal, harrypotter, informal, register, style, videos

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