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.