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

[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...