Languagelearning and (fan)fiction

[martyna]

I don't know what about all of you, but personally fiction -and especially fanfiction- has helped me to learn English. It was more complicated for French, since I had a slight aversion for it due to one of my French teachers. But, being European, books in those languages are fairly easy to come by, thus guaranteeing a facility to find reading material.
Now, I'm focusing on Japanese currently and while there's a BookOff (happy me!) I have a hard time finding authors and books to enjoy. I've asked around for recommendations, but there's not much turning up. Also, it might simply be easier to read on the computer (while I prefer books) due to the wonderful look-up tools. Fanfiction having helped me in previous cases, I started to look around for some. The meagre results are not worth mentioning... so, my questions are two:

Have you used fandom for language acquisition and if, how so?
Do you know any Japanese site with fanfiction? (I've basically been mostly involved in the Harry Potter stuff, but there are others as well. Any place I could start from would be good.)

Other related comments are welcome, too!

Comments

[torachan]

Unfortunately Japanese fandom tends to be pretty fragmented. People post fics on individual websites, but they don't go in for archives. And often stuff is heavily password protected (especially anything explicit, western source fandoms, or RPS) and you have to answer convoluted questions/riddles to get access to the stuff.

Your best bet would be to try googling for what you want. Sites will usually have links sections that lead to other sites and you can go from there.

I don't know what HP pairings you're interested in, but say you wanted Harry/Draco, I googled ハリドラ　小説 and got quite a few sites, including this links page, which has mostly het sites (Harry/Hermione and Ron/Hermione), but also links to some H/D stuff, including a site called Behind the Rose Bushes, which also has a bunch of links, this time to lots of H/D sites, as well as others. It also has a link to HariDora Search, which is an H/D links/search site (kind of like the old webrings people used to belong to), which should lead you to more stuff.

Do you know fannish terms in Japanese? If not, I can give you a rundown of terms that will help you find stuff.

[martyna]

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I tried googling for ハリー・ポッター+ファンフィクション/fanfiction and similar but endet up with nothing. I haven't thought to try any pairing directly.
I'll probably spend far too much time browsing through these sites today. *big, happy grin*

I do not know any single fannish term. I haven't been very active in fandom lately, but know a bunch of (German and) English terms, but everything else is a secret to me. So I'd appreciate any help. :)

[torachan]

The term fanfiction/fanfic is probably known to some, at least those who have contact with English-speaking fandom, but in general they just use the word 小説 for fic. (Similarly, just 絵　or イラスト instead of fanart.)

For pairings, Japanese fans usually use smushed names made up of the first two syllables of each name. So Harry/Draco would be ハリドラ, Harry/Hermione would be　ハリハー, etc. I'm not too sure on all of them, though, such as whether Snape is referred to by first or last name. And also for slash pairings, order indicates who's the seme and who's the uke, so some pairings may not exist at all one way and some may show up both ways.

If you like slash, some terms that tend to be used a lot are 801 (the numbers can be read as ya-o-i, so it's common code) and 女性向け. Um...when I answered your post the first time, I totally had other fannish terms in mind, but now I've totally blanked on what I was going to say. Still, hopefully you will be able to find some more stuff now!

[martyna]

I usually don't take the uke and seme thing seriously. *rolls eyes* But it's good to know all that. I've seen ハリハー on one site and thought "WHAT? Who is that?"
If anything else comes into your mind...

PS: Have some Totoro!

[torachan]

Japanese fans are pretty serious about seme/uke!

[martyna]

.__.' Oh my! Well, I'll see.

[viklikesfic]

Ha! I was going to suggest you ask torachan about this, and look, there he is.

In my case, I wish more European writers would write fanfiction in their native languages! I know a couple of French fans and several German fans and they all write exclusively in English. Granted, I don't blame anyone for that, b/c fandom is overwhelmingly English-speaking, but I'd love to be able to use fanfiction as a language-learning tool. I did once write a ficlet in French and have a French friend beta it for me, which was fun.

[martyna]

It may be because you can reach a lot more people in English. I want to take up again podficcing, argh!
*laughs*

[viklikesfic]

Hee! I tried podficcing (in English) but I don't know what it is, there's something about my voice that I think makes it hard to understand if you're not used to me.

[glinda]

Yeah, I can see how that would help, I've always had a better reading/written comprehension than aural/spoken comprehension with other languages so fiction's a great way to build vocabulary without negotiating unfamiliar accents.

Personally I'm learning Gaelic at the moment and being a minority language its really quite hard to find fiction resources as it tends towards either being aimed at small children or at adult native speakers with nothing in between. I've started writing fanfic in Gaelic for practice but I've not found any to read yet. :(

[pseudo_tsuga]

I'm learning Russian and I want to break into the fandom but I don't know much slang or fannish terms plus I don't know how they organize it. So I sympathize!

[jaaaarne]

But well, there is always me. ;)
If there is anything I can help with - just ask, I'll be willing to help. Russian fandom is generally a friendly bunch. :)

[pseudo_tsuga]

Спасибо огромное! I basically know nothing about it so I want to learn the basics, like how you would begin to find fandoms for stuff. Where do they hang out? What's some of the fannish slang? Also, if you know any places for Harry Potter or anime and manga (especially Hetalia) fandom that would be great. Thank you again for helping me out.

[jaaaarne]

Lots of Russian-speaking fandoms reside on journalling platforms or forums. There are archives, but not that many. Most popular places are LJ and Diary.Ru, sometimes LiveInternet.Ru

There is an HP archive my sister showed me once and which I frequent myself ever since: SnapeTales.com

There are lots of stories originally written in Russian, it's a big archive. It might be a bit difficult to navigate due to the language stylization, so if you have any troubles you can just ask. :) I'll give a direct link to a fiction section to start with: http://snapetales.com/index.php?id=3 (sorted by genre)

The site also has a forum.

I can give you more links later if you want, have to ask my sister. :)

As for anime, there is wide array of anime sites and archives, so you need to specify. Finding them is not usually a big trouble. Anime fandoms were one of the first to ever appear on the RuNet along with Tolkien ones. :)

Hetalia... hmm... Hetalia is tough 'cause I know little about it. I have a friend who is very much into it, and she also speaks English, but sadly has a locked diary. I can ask her about more links, if you wish. There's also a community I know that she frequents: http://www.diary.ru/~Hetalia/

As for fannish slang, it's hard to get something off the top of my head. Maybe give me some examples so I could understand what exactly you mean? :)

[pseudo_tsuga]

this is so helpful! Thank you again. I'll probably just poke around for a while to see how much I can get without referring to a dictionary.

For fannish terms, I meant stuff like OTP or squee or anything like that but don't feel obligated to find out if you don't already know.

[jaaaarne]

Ah, I see what you mean. :)

Thing is, most terms came into Russian-speaking fandom from English-speaking one, so most of them are direct phonetic derivatives. This way most times "pairing" will be "пейринг", "challenge fest" = "челлендж" or "фест", "slash" = "слэш", "femslash" = "фемслэш", "het" = "гет" and so on and so forth. Some terms can have translations (eg. "альтернативная вселенная"), but abbreviations often used either as-is or as phonetic transcriptions from English source: "OTP" = "ОТП", "PWP" = "ПВП", "RPS" = "РПС" etc.

Some fandoms can have fandom-specific terms, and there can be lots of variations in such cases depending on the fandom origins. The general fannish terminology, though, is 90% loanwords.

[imagina]

I'm also learning japanese right now, but I'm using manga and bl novels rather than fanfiction because like you I couldn't find any on the internet.
I've found that BL (boys love) novels have some of the trappings of fanfiction, which is a plus for me. If you have access to a Book Off, maybe you can find the Only the ring finger knows series by Satoru Kannagi.

And if you want to complement that, many BL novels (the Ring finger series included) have been made into BL dramas. I find that helps me with pronunciation and readings of kanji. I'm going to try that same thing with the first Harry Potter book and the japanese audiobook.

[martyna]

I do not read a lot of manga anymore and books, well, I try to limit buying them, though in Japanese that would be okay. I'd just be afraid to grab something far too explicit for me - though I wouldn't probably understand it anyway. BookOff is -and will be- a source for reading material, but I'm also looking for rather short fictions (drabbles, ficlets, snippets) that you can easily go through...