fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3181 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3181 ⌋

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Context: I'm French; while in highschool I was taught decent amounts of Spanish (which, sadly, I've since forgotten), a bit of Latin, and laughably minimalist amounts of English. What I speak now I learnt by myself, after graduating, by reading comic books, fantasy novels, and on the internet.

Now I'd like to learn German and I figured that a self-teaching method and a dictionary won't be enough, I need a fandom to help motivate me. But I don't know where to start looking in the first place...

So. Can you rec me a few German books that would be easy to read and make a good basis for a fandom, please? Any genre you like, I'm not picky.

Walter Moers?

Not sure if they're easy to read, but awesome books!

You could find some of Michael Ende's fantasy. Specifically, The Neverending Story was originally in German. There's already a western and English fandom for this, though.

Seconding The Neverending Story!

The Inkheart Trilogy?

Thank you for posting this! I'm starting to learn German in a week, so I'll just listen to all the recs :D Reading is my primary means of learning languages.

If you're into fanfic you could read German fic for your English fandoms? fanfiktion.de is probably the biggest German fanfic archive.

As for books YA is probably the way to go. Personally I like most of Ralf Isau's books (especially the Neschan trilogy and Das Netz der Schattenspiele).

I heard good things about the Edelsteintrilogie by Kerstin Gier, a trilogy about a girl whose family has a gene that allows them to time travel. It starts with Rubinrot.

Cornelia Funke is a very good YA/kids book author. Someone already mentioned Inkheart, but I actually prefer Der Herr der Diebe.

I don't know if any of them have fandoms as such. :/ If you go with older stuff like Otfried Preußler's works (Räuber Hotzenplotz, Die kleine Hexe, Krabat) you'll certainly find a lot of discussion online, but I don't even know where German fandom takes place these days.

I'd add Drachenreiter to that list. Because everything's better with dragons.

I can't agree with the "just read German fanfic" because you will not learn any great German from that. German fanfics are hugely terrible. (This is probably mostly bias speaking. I used to know a lot of the people working for the mentioned fanfiktion.de archive and got to see all the beautfully horrfying trash they got there.)

I will always recommend Krabat by Otfried Preußler because it's one of my all time favourite books, but the style could be a bit ... dated and might not be the easiest to start with.

A lot of the recs here in this thread are already great (even though I'm not personally a fan of all of them). You could also look for German translations of books and comic books you already know - there are a lot of German translations of Franco-Belgian comic books.

I read Krabat in my native language and I second the rec.

Actually, what about other stuff by the same guy? In particular, the Hotzenplotz series? Okay, it's for children, but it means that the language is pretty easy to understand. Plus, it's AWESOME. I love it to bits.

Oh wow it's been years since I read the Hotzenplotz series. But yeah, sbsolutely. I really like Preußler in general - as above anon mentioned, Die kleine Hexe is also pretty adorable.

Michael Ende has a few really great books as well. Neverending story was already mentioned, but one of his most popular books is probably "Momo". I remember reading a book of his called "Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch" /catches breath. It's pretty cute as well.

And of course I shouldn't have forgotten Erich Kästner. Might be a bit dated as well, but his books are definitely classics when it comes to children's literature (that is still readable for teens and adults).

Another classic that I love is "Die rote Zora und ihre Bande" by Kurt Held/Kurt Kläber.

Anon above who pointed out fanfiktion.de. I thought of fanfic because that was actually how I got into the English language in the first place. Someone was translating a HP fic into German and when I hit the end of the translation I so desperately wanted to read more that I actually looked up the English original and read that with the help of a dictionary.

That was during a time when I just managed to not get a 5 in English for two years in a row; the next year I only just missed a 2 and my English teacher even pulled me aside to tell me how proud she was of me for working so hard. For the record, I am the laziest student you will ever meet and the only reason I got good at English was to read smutty HP fanfic.

Even if the fanfic is bad* it will give you vocabulary and a basic sense for the language. And it's good for learning because it isn't great German/English - writing styles of fanfic tend to be a lot simpler than in published books. For a beginner having simple sentences structure and a familiar canon is really helpful.

* Looking back the English fics I read in the beginning were incredibly bad. Toe-curling bad, the kind of bad were today I would backbutton after the first two lines, but they were very simple to read. I had stumbled across good fic but quickly got frustrated with them because they were beyond my skill level at the time.

Heh, I actually absolutely agree. I think it's also mostly a problem native speakers have with fanfic in their own language: It always seems so much more cringeworthy. I am very, very sure that the fanfic I started out with when first reading English language fanfic would have made English native speakers cringe just as much.

I actually improved my English in a similar way, tbh. And really, I have no real basis for my prejudices anymore, considerin I haven't read a German fanfic in over a decade.

I checked fanfiktion.de out a couple of years ago and it's still awful (though they changed their layout and functions, maybe it's now easier to find quality stuff), but as a beginner you just don't realise how bad something is written.

Though I imagine that using fanfic as a gateway is harder when you have actual standards. When I switched to English I was 13/14 and I ate everything up: super!Harry, woobie!Harry, sparkly Mary-Sues, evil!Dumbledore, and so on. The edgier the better. Heck, I probably would have liked the first few chapters of My Immortal unironically if it had been published just a tick earlier.

I'd also simply rec books you've already read in your native language in their German version. Already knowing what's going on will prob help you understand words in their context and stuff.

[ SECRET POST #3181 ]

rec wanted please: german fandoms?

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

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Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?

tl;dr about my own experience

Re: tl;dr about my own experience

AYRT

Re: rec wanted please: german fandoms?