Snowflake challenge, day 5

[flo_nelja]

Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom.

So, lots of things!
* I met half of my best friends there!
* It's the place where I met the queer people and queer conversations that made me understand I was queer.
* It made me understand that I could try and write even if I hadn't the writing level of the Big Classics,
* It made me learn English at least after school failed to teach it to me, which helped for point 1 :D

Comments

[kaanbaltla]

Oh, high-five to points 3 and 4!

Really, learning English through fandom is super common for us ESL, isn't it? Not only because school fails (always, damned school systems!) but also because we have a (pretty good) insentive to put extra-effort in doing so.

[flo_nelja]

I know a lot of people who have learned English through school though! I was just bad at it.
And also! Even if you're good at it if you don't use it you forget! So fandom can help here too once you've left school!

[sarajayechan]

* It's the place where I met the queer people and queer conversations that made me understand I was queer.

Meeting a trans lesbian friend is part of how I discovered I was bi when I was 17. So I feel that.

[flo_nelja]

Yeah! In fandom too, or unrelated?

[sarajayechan]

In fandom, we met through Sailor Moon.

[tsuki_no_bara]

i'm going to assume learning english through fandom is more fun than learning it in school. :D and i love that fandom helped you figure out you were queer.

[flo_nelja]

Even with good teachers (I had one, once), you need to practive, and is there better practice than fandom? :D
Because of this, though, I have no concept of what is American and what is English.

[pattrose]

Great post. Isn’t it wonderful how great online friends are? Have a great weekend.

[flo_nelja]

Yess they are! And you too!

[malurette]

Ah!! Merci pour cette liste, j'avais vaguement le point n°1 et pas vraiment plus, mais en fait... ouais, c'est à peu près pareil pour moi ?

[flo_nelja]

Yeah, même expérience ! :D

[silveradept]

The people in fandom are some of the best people that you come across. (Sometimes some of the worst, too, but this is a happy things post.) And I'm not surprised there are people in fandom who help us with figuring out queerness and providing some of the vocabulary needed to have a better understanding of it all.

(Yay for writing, even if you know it's not going to be the Next Great Novel! We love having more people doing writing.)

[flo_nelja]

Thank you!
I read so many Big Classics in high school, it was very good, but it gave me unreasonable standards for a pleasant to read book ^^

[silveradept]

Yeah, reading all the Great Novels gives you a pretty skewed sense of what great writing is, and it has to be tempered with enjoyable writing.

[nonesensed]

Huzzah for fandom! 🥳🥳🥳 And yeah, learning better English than in school definitely happened for me too thanks to fandom. Needing to learn a language to understand something one wants to know is definitely way more motivating than "learn the language to learn the language" 😁

[flo_nelja]

Yes but the school basis definitely help!
It's not only wanting to understand, it's having a graduation, including quite easy things. Short texts, illustrated texts, etc.
There are a lot of languages where I want to read books but <i don't have any steps to learning it

[nonesensed]

Absolutely! Learning the basics in school is 100% a help, and learning a new language without basic lessons is crazy hard. And it does get more difficult as we age, since what's engaging and motivating material to engage with that's at the "current understanding level" becomes trickier and trickier to find. Also, I've found I'm far less comfortable making mistakes now that I'm in my late 30s than when I was in my teens, which makes me practice languages I'm not semi-fluent in far faaar less 😅 I used to be pretty good at German, but I've not been keeping that active, so I've lost a lot of it. Hopefully I'll be able to recover some of it one day, but not until I can be more relaxed about making mistakes and find a ton of super motivating things to watch/read only in German.