Harry brings all his stuff home and then has to carry it all back to the station.

Covered lots of ground today. My prediction has been true so far. Once out of Diagon Alley, the vocabulary became much easier.

Current Page in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone	107
Number of pages read	7
Total Vocab (jMemorize)	342
Vocab Learned Since Last Blog	38

Harry's back home but not for long. After getting home, (and how did he carry all his stuff to his house, from the station? I get a sore arm just carrying groceries home.) and spending a few months lying on his bed reading school work with an owl flying over head, it's time to pack everything up, clear his throat, ξερόβηξε, and ask his Uncle to take him to the station.

Have to admit that the last couple of pages are effective and are one of the reasons I like Harry Potter. When Harry says good-bye to Hagrid and returns to the land of the Muggles, one can feel the ache of returning to the mundane from the world of fantasy.

The sense of wonder and amazement is the pay-off of fantasy and science fiction literature and when a book is firing on all cylinders you feel it in full force. In the next chapter Harry meets Ron and throws money around like real estate agents at a Las Vegas strip club.

Harry buys a bunch of stuff with weird names

Changed the site name to nicophon.blogspot.com. (sorry for the inconvenience)

Progress for the last week has been OK, though over half of my progress was made this weekend.

Current Page	100
Number of pages read	18
Total Vocab (jMemorize)	304
Vocab Learned Since Last Blog	200

Harry's at Diagon Alley. O.M.G. What a vocabulary nightmare. I thought that perhaps most of the specialized magical vocabulary might be borrowed from the English. But that certainly wasn't the case. Not only where there a lot of words that I didn't know, but many of the words were rare and specialized words that I couldn't find in my Greek-English dictionary or the various online resources that I had some seem to be words from Greek folk literature. The result being that it took me a ton of time to look up many of the words which I might very well never run into again, outside of Harry Potter.

Still the story is great fun and my progress has been constant. In a few short pages Harry will have his magic wand and he'll be off to platform 9 and 3/4 (πλακφόρμα 9 και 3/4). After that I'm hoping that I'll start seeing some real progress.

Current Page	82
Number of pages read	7
Total Vocab(jMemorize)	137
Vocab Learned today	50

Harry's on his way to Diagon Alley! I had an embarrassing moment tonight were I was relating my progress and I called it Diagonal Alley. Lordy. I was as though I had pronounced every word in Hors d'Oeuvres with a heavy southern drawl. For those that are interested the Greek is: Διαγώνιος Αλέα.

Current progress: I read about 6 pages today; I'm at page 76. I had about 70 unknown words. That's quite a lot. Almost all of my Greek study time goes into learning unknown words at this point. I could push onwards, rather than learning every questionable word, as I am able to get the gist. But my goal is to totally master the Rowling's vocabulary so that I can begin increasing my reading rate. Currently, I read at about 26 words a minute (not counting word look-ups which I only do once I have finished a section). I would like to get that to 100 by the end of the Philosopher's Stone.

My favorite line of the last couple of pages is the one that Harry says to himself after waking up the next day after having met Hagrid, the half giant and keeper of the keys (κλειδοκράτορας). He thinks that the the whole thing was just a dream,

“Και να η θεία Πετούνια, που μου χτυπά την πόρτα για να ξυπνήσω.” (Note, in Greek the punctuation seems to always go outside the quotation marks.)

Translated: “And now Aunt Petunia is knocking at my door to wake me up.”

Of course it wasn't a dream and it's not Aunt Petunia'; it's an owl knocking at the window to deliver the morning newspaper.