Martyna ([personal profile] martyna) wrote in [community profile] language_learning2010-04-05 04:36 pm

Languagelearning and (fan)fiction

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!
jaaaarne: Photo of a seagull in flight, with slight motion blur. (Default)

[personal profile] jaaaarne 2010-04-09 06:58 am (UTC)(link)
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.