I have strongly mixed feelings about how Farsi words and phrases are inserted into the text. Obviously they provide some authenticity and the feeling of immersion in the culture. But something about the way they are sprinkled in irks me.

First gripe: almost every time right after the Farsi is used, the literal English translation follows. I understand that sometimes there is no better way, but at other times context would be enough to understand the sentence and the double Farsi + English feels redundant.

Second gripe: some of the Farsi words inserted into the text are just random, everyday words. It makes sense that words and phrases related to Persian culture are rendered in Farsi, such as food terms, courtesy expressions etc. But why, for example, the word shojaat had to be inserted in Farsi, which just means bravery?

I know I'm being nitpicky but it does impact my enjoyment of this book.

Celebrating because I am finally at a point where I can read native content in Chinese, and now I can officially say that the first book I ever read cover-to-cover in Mandarin was a short baihe 🥹 Towards the end it was honestly just will-power keeping me going, I only know maybe 2k~ words or so, and with the book that I chose the first few chapters had very simple language since the main character is a sparrow, but then after she turned into a human the difficulty level just instantly shot up by like, a lot LOL. For those last few chapters I was clutching my pop-up dictionary for dear life 😭 It was a cute little story tho so I have no regrets 🫡 Very excited for my future reading journey! I feel like I just opened up a massive door to a whole other world. Sadly I couldn't log my progress with this book on here since it's a webnovel and they don't have serial numbers, which will probably be the case for a lot of books I read going forward ^^; I heard that the new update to the book system affected the placeholder books too so I guess I'll just have to find some alternative way to log them from now on 🤔

something i’m really loving about the books that the movies didn’t capture is how much sass and backbone harry actually has. i feel like, especially in the first movie, they make him seem like this defenseless little kid who’s always just the victim. and while he is a victim of the dursleys, the books let us see his actual thoughts, and he pushes back way more than the movies show. he knows he doesn’t deserve the way they treat him, and he isn’t afraid to stand up for himself when he can. it honestly makes me root for him even more because he doesn’t just accept everything, they actually let him have some fight in him

Okay okay, I’m OBSESSED already!! The narration is impeccable in the audiobook.