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

[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.