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

[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.