12 Comments

1. actonthat says:

   January 29, 2013 at 7:02 pm

   [I’m sorry if my grammar is horrible, I’ll try to make it better, it is a little hard for me, ’cause I’m brazilian and I’m still learning english. :)]

   So she knows too little English for proper grammar in her story, but enough to know that native speakers truncate “because” in a certain way and that when you do that, it’s proper to use an apostrophe in place of the missing letters?

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   1. Sessalisk says:

      January 30, 2013 at 1:33 am

      A lot of people pick up language by subconsciously mimicking others rather than by learning all the syntax and then applying it consciously. This even happens in academic settings.

      In French, for instance, one of the very first things people learn is how to say “I call myself (name)”, or “je m’appelle (nom)”. This uses the contracted reflexive pronoun, me, which is usually not taught, or even given in full, until much, much later later.

      I picked up French colloquialisms from a chatroom when I was still learning how to use their past perfect. It ain’t rocket science. lol.

      Here’s David Foster Wallace on the subject:

      “Whether we’re conscious of it or or, most of us
      are fluent in more than one major English dialect and in a large number of subdialects and are probably
      at least passable in countless others. Which dialect you choose to use depends, of course, on whom
      you’re addressing. More to the point, I submit that the dialect you use depends mostly on what sort
      of Group your listener is part of and whether you wish to present yourself as a fellow member of that
      Group. An obvious example is that traditional upper-class English has certain dialectal differences
      from lower-class English and that schools used to have courses in Elocution whose whole point was
      to teach people how to speak in an upper-class way. But usage-as-inclusion is about much more than
      class. Here’s another thought experiment: A bunch of U.S. teenagers in clothes that look far too large for
      them are sitting together in the local mall’s Food Court, and a 53-year-old man with a combover and clothes
      that fit comes over to them and says that he was scoping them and thinks they’re totally rad and/or
      phat and is it cool if he just kicks it and does the hang here with them. The kids’ reaction is going to
      be either scorn or embarrassment for the guy — most likely a mix of both. Q: Why? Or imagine that two
      hard-core urban black guys are standing there talking and I, who am resoundingly and in all ways
      white, come up and greet them with “Yo” and call them “Brothers” and ask “s’up, s’goin on,” pronouncing
      on with that NYCish oo-o diphthong that Young Urban Black English deploys for a standard o. Either
      these guys are going to be offended or they are going to think I am simply out of my mind. No other
      reaction is remotely foreseeable. Q: Why?

      Why: A dialect of English is learned and used either
      because it’s your native vernacular or because it’s the dialect of a Group by which you wish
      (with some degree of plausibility) to be accepted. And although it is the major and arguably
      the most important one, SWE is only one dialect. And it is never, or at least hardly ever, anybody’s
      only dialect. This is because there are — as you and I both know and yet no one in the Usage Wars
      ever seems to mention — situations in which faultlessly correct SWE is clearly not the appropriate dialect.
      Childhood is full of such situations. This is one reason why SNOOTlets tend to have a
      very hard social time of it in school. A SNOOTlet is a little kid who’s wildly, precociously fluent in
      SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just about every class has a SNOOTlet, so I know
      you’ve seen them — these are the sorts of six- to twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and
      whose response to striking out in T-ball is to cry out “How incalculably dreadful!” etc.
      The elementary-school SNOOTlet is one of the earliest identifiable species of academic Geekoid and
      is duly despised by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don’t see
      the incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is receiving from his classmates, or if they do
      see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and arbitrary cruelty
      of which children are capable. But the other children’s punishment of the SNOOTIet is not
      arbitrary at all. There are important things at stake. Little kids in school are learning about
      Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and
      about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion.
      They’re
      learning about Discourse Communities. Kids learn this stuff not in English or Social Studies but
      on the playground and at lunch and on the bus. When his peers are giving the SNOOTlet monstrous
      quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there’s serious learning
      going on … for everyone except the little SNOOT, who in fact is being punished for precisely
      his failure to learn. What neither he nor his teacher realizes is that the SNOOTlet is deficient in
      Language Arts. He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar,
      cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it’s these abilities that are really required for “peer rapport,”
      which is just a fancy Elementary-Ed term for being accepted by the most important Group in the little kid’s life.This reviewer acknowledges that there seems to be some, umm, personal stuff getting dredged up
      and worked out here; but the stuff is relevant. The point is that the little A+ SNOOTlet is actually
      in the same dialectal position as the class’s “slow” kid who can’t learn to stop using ain’t or bringed.
      One is punished in class, the other on the playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic
      skill — viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,” the ability to
      communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and another with family and
      another with Little League coaches and so on. Most of these dialectal adjustments are made
      below the level of conscious awareness, and our ability to make them seems part psychological
      and part something else — perhaps something hardwired into the same motherboard as Universal
      Grammar — and in truth this ability is a far better indicator of a kid’s “Verbal I.Q.” than test scores
      or grades, since U.S. English classes do far more to retard dialectal talent than to cultivate it.”
      (Article here.)

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      1. Farla says:

         January 31, 2013 at 1:57 pm

         I’d give one caveat to that – the upper class dialect is usually harder to learn, so the connection with intelligence is there, even if it is 95% just a matter of if you hear it growing up or not. “Bringed” and other stuff is instinctively accurate grammar, all little kids will do it by taking the basic rules of English grammar and applying them. “Brought” is one of the million exceptions you’re expected to learn to prove you’re smart enough to learn a huge list of arbitrary irregular words.

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2. purplekitte says:

   January 29, 2013 at 7:54 pm

   Every time someone uses the excuse English isn’t their native language, I wonder what non-English fandoms even exist, where to find them. I have no idea. Every once in a while I’ll see one or two non-English fics on ff. net or AO3, but there’s not much. I know a lot of Japanese fanart sites, but not fanfic ones and nothing about other languages. I’m sure these things exist, but I’ve never looked. Lord knows I’d be too embarrassed for my couple Japanese-language fanfics to ever see the light of day, and I can go read untranslated manga or light novel scans if I want language practice with something fun. While it’s no excuse for most of the things wrong with most of the fics, it probably would suck to be stuck either having a tiny potential audience in your native language on these parts of the internet or having to write in another language that you’re not that great at.

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   1. Jax says:

      January 30, 2013 at 2:33 am

      They’re probably found via searching for your fandom in your country-specific Google or through word-of-mouth. *sage nod* Sounds mundane, but hey, it’s how a lot of people find the English-speaking communities anyway.

      That being said, when it comes to Pokémon, there’s actually a number of international forums out there. Admittedly, I can’t remember the names of a lot of them (for obvious reasons), but I have stumbled across Italian and German Pokémon communities. (One of the affiliates of my domain is even an Italian fan community with its very own old-school fanfiction index. Too lazy to get my comment auto-screened for spam via posting links at the moment, but they’re called Vera’s Tales. And they’re fab if you know Italian. There’s also Pokémon Central if you’re feeling particularly Italian on any given day.)
      It’s true, though, that the foreign-language fandoms tend to be on the smaller side compared to the English ones. (I wouldn’t necessarily say that they’re tiny, but Pokémon Central’s no Serebii.) If it helps, most of the reason why is because most of the main hubs for various fandoms are in English. Really ethnocentric, sure, but it sort of makes sense. It’s a cycle, really. Native English speakers are the first people (besides the people in the fandom’s native country) to put up huge-ass fandom sites. Foreigners flock to fandom sites, join, and communicate in English. Tons of people congregate to the English sites to the point where it’s assumed that nothing else would be successful, so the foreigners just don’t create huge fansites that become serious competition for the English ones.

      There’s also some non-speculation going on here too. If you think about it, English is the closest thing to a universal language online. People all over the internet might know handfuls of other languages, but generally speaking, everyone learns English to communicate online. A site in Icelandic, for example, only appeals to people who read Icelandic, but not everyone learns Icelandic. Sure, not everyone learns English either, but schools in a multitude of countries are more likely to teach it in some form than, well, Icelandic. So people decide to write fandom sites in English (or with an option to view it in English — and even then, the community associated with it is usually chatting away in English anyway) because it’s just more practical. You can get more people to view and participate in the community you’re developing if you can speak a language they can understand, and to a webmaster, hits really are important.

      (Of course, if Dragonfree did rewrite her entire site in Icelandic, I’d at least have one less excuse for why I haven’t bothered to teach myself a Scandinavian language yet. *shot!*)

      But anyway, yeah, that’s the sucky part about foreign fandoms. There’s a lot more allure to the English ones. Sure, you still have your Icelandic ones or Italian ones or what-have-you if you so wish, but like I said, they’re no FFNet or Serebii. So people try to learn English, and it is admirable that they put that much effort into getting their work seen. I know I’d never be able to do that.

      ‘Course, it’d be great if they put that much work into taking advice as well as being seen, but hey.

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      1. Farla says:

         January 31, 2013 at 2:00 pm

          If you think about it, English is the closest thing to a universal language online.

         And I am so grateful for it, because god knows I can’t learn other languages. I hope it stays that way until we invent some way to jam chips in our brains in place of regular learning.

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   2. Negrek says:

      January 30, 2013 at 3:55 am

       Japanese fandoms for mainstream Japanese franchises (e.g. Pokemon) tend to be very large, and Chinese fandoms can get very big. To find Japanese stuff I imagine you can just tell Google to search for japanese-language sites. For Chinese, Baidu. My hunch is that there’s more bleed into English fandoms from Western countries, where the language is a bit more similar and the population so much smaller that you probably noticeably miss out on stuff if you don’t dip a toe into English fandom.

      Makes me wonder what kind of fandom stuff you’d find from India. (They’re right behind the US in terms of the number of Internet users at last count, I believe, and overtaking us soon.)

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      1. Nocturnal Night says:

         January 30, 2013 at 4:20 am

         That’s a good point. I’m Chinese and here in China, nobody would write fanfics about. Apparently it’s not our ‘style’. 

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         1. Farla says:

            January 31, 2013 at 2:01 pm

            Hm. So you have Japan and their fanmanga, then on the other side China not doing that… I wonder how the rest of the countries in the area shake out? Maybe Japan got a head start by absorbing and redoing a lot of American media.

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3. Jax says:

   January 30, 2013 at 1:57 am

   (on WII so please don’t critisize grammar and spelling

   …I’m hoping I misread this because:

   1. Last I checked, you can’t save files to the Wii, meaning you can’t upload a fic written on only the Wii to FFNet unless you use a computer as a middleman device. At which point, you’d really have less of an excuse than the people who actually try to use their Wii to write and post fics on forums. Which is saying something. Mainly that you might be magical.

   2. Writing a fic using the Wiimote. Just… yeah. Okay, yeah, I know the Wii can be hooked up to a keyboard, but I prefer questioning people’s life decisions over assuming they’re sensible.

   ‘Course, they could also be talking about WWII. Should that be the case, though, I might actually wonder if all those people who were calling you Hitler were on to something.

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   1. Farla says:

      January 31, 2013 at 2:03 pm

      Actually, you can write directly into the upload box on FFN now.

      Not that this excuses the must-post-instantly thing, because you still have to save it to the document manager first either way.

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4. Keltena says:

   February 8, 2013 at 3:51 am

   I’m so stunned by the response citing ‘anime logic’ that it’s actually looping around into a vaguely impressed feeling. Good job, internet; I honestly wasn’t expecting that one.

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