It's... not Seam-Uss?

 

Nope. It's pronounced Shame-uss.

 

Hell, I thought the same until I was like 15 on account of being illiterate Australian swine. When I finally made the connection between the character and my racist hate-filled stereotypes (all of them being green drunks named shay-mus) about the Irish, I damn near shat a second Uluru.

 

I pronounced 'Sirius' as 'Cyrus' for a while. Lucius was also 'Loo-shuss'.

I also pictured Hagrid as Tony the Tiger. I still mentally read his lines with Tony the Tiger's voice. Snape had a neckbeard too.

 

It's not Loo-shuss!?

 

I thought it was more like Loo-see-uss.

 

Depends on your accent. Both are technically correct.

 

God damn you people need to learn to read.

 

I was taught to read phonetically, which means that anything borrowed from a foreign language is going to be horribly mangled. For example: Akatsuki "Ah Cat Suki" and not " Ah Cut Ski".

 

I came in here to see what I'd been pronouncing wrong in Harry Potter, only to learn that I've been doing Naruto wrong for years as well.

/facepalm

 

???

If they're able to post in a forum, reading obviously isn't the problem.

 

Right? Ginerva sounds like a deleterious condition.

"He was suffering from a pernicious case of ginerva, but the doctor prescribed some antibiotics and a special shampoo; hopefully that will clear it up."

There's lumbago, vertigo, and ginerva. God help you if you get all three at once.

I know there are a lot of people out there who think Ginny is a disease but, really, 'Ginerva?' I've just never understood that one. It doesn't sound like something you'd name a human being... more like a classification for fungus. :facepalm

 

I used to pronounce it Lu-Key-Us, as in the latin name.

 

Wait what? FML...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0vULPvZbcc

 

I, too, was under the belief that Ginny's full name was Ginerva. Well, live and learn. Seamus was 'Seam-uss' too, at least until the movies.

 

I don't know why, but I remember when I first read Harry Potter 7, I thought that the '19 years later' bit was a lot more than 19 years later. So I pictured Harry & co. as upper-middle aged, instead of in their 30s.

Even once I figured out it was only 19 years later, I couldn't get rid of the mental image until the movie came out. xD

 

That Harry Potter was a wizard with magical powers who attended Hogwarts.

http://imgur.com/gallery/wq8Xm

In all seriousness, I also got the pronunciation wrong on Sirius. Also, I don't remember exactly if I thought this and this would be a fairly large misconception if so but I believe there was a strong chance I thought Tonks was a man when I first read OotP. :facepalm

Yes, that's a fairly large reading fail but I was much younger then and was probably just gobbling down the book as fast as I could.

Last misconception I had(and this is just my personal opinion here) that PoA (my favorite Hp book) would eventually be outclassed by a later book in the series. To me it never was, and remains my favorite. I'm not sure why I liked PoA so much but I just find that one to be particularly excellent. It was also a refreshing change that Voldemort really wasn't in the book at all and instead focused on characters like Lupin, Sirius, and Peter.