Magia!

Today is a very proud day for me.  For the past two months I have been trying to read the first Harry Potter; the Portuguese version that a friend from school lent me.  The first pages, or chapters to tell the truth, went by painfully slowly as I stumbled through the words and foreign grammar conjugations.  At first it was very difficult, one page would take me ten minutes to read, painstakingly looking up every word that I didn't know or couldn't understand with the context.  But about when Harry got to Hogwarts I started picking up the pace and enjoying the familiar story.  But the time Hermione almost got killed by the troll I noticed that I wasn't translating the words back to English in my head anymore, instead I was just reading and understand them as they were on the page.  When I realized that, I jumped up and did a little dance.  As the characters developed I continued to flip the pages faster and faster, learning more words every day.  Not only did I learn "bruxo" -witch- and "corujas" -owls-, but also vocabulary that I have started using in everyday conversation.  And today, ladies and gentlemen, I completed my first book in Portuguese, an accomplishment that I feel is blog-worthy.