plebefic headers: but the zombies grip me the most

[cimorene]

1. Summary: Adam lives his delusional life and pines, until one day Kris slaps him in the face...



2. Summary: “Fine if you’re so brilliant, smart arse, tell me the reagents and conditions needed when turning a aromatic amine into a azo dye. Both stages,” Frank smirked smugly, it was one of the hardest questions he knew. He silently watched as Gerard thought over the answer.



3. Summary: “After all I’ve been through,” he growls. It frightens me a bit—hearing his voice change so much—but the zombies grip me the most. “It’s like I have a bullet proof heart.”



4. [Subject line:] Dirty Like the Tipe of your Tongue.



5. Summary: Kris has hooked up with the biggest Diva known to humankind and hopes to tame him. Will Adam Lambert finally grow up and become the partner Kris needs?

Comments

[cimorene]

Honestly, I can't imagine returning to a state of mind where I could read Kradam again, even in quite short doses. Otherwise I would be willing to look at what you were writing, so if you have something else easily accessible you'd like me to look at, I'd be willing. But I don't know how helpful that will be to you, because as much as I can continue trying to correct and explain the errors you're making, and I say this as someone who's learned my second fluent language entirely in adulthood, you'll learn much faster and better by immersing yourself in more English as much as possible.

In my case, it happened because 1) my sister-in-law gave birth to triplets and they needed a lot of help, so I was suddenly spending a lot of time with my in-laws surrounded by casual conversational Swedish; and 2) I needed to read a lot of textbooks, and hear a lot of lectures, in Swedish for university. But the latter, while it helped improve my esoteric vocabulary, didn't do a tenth of what the former did for me. It's hearing the language in a variety of situations and carrying on a variety of conversations in it yourself that really makes the biggest difference in mastering the language, because your language brain soaks up not just words but expressions and contexts and how-do-people-say-this and what-do-you-say-in-that-situation and grammatical structures and idioms like a sponge. It's why they push becoming an exchange student as the best way to learn languages, no doubt (it's probably pretty similar, and a much easier and less permanent way to acquire a foreign family than marrying into it :)).

So, I mean, I don't know where you live, but wherever that is, you probably can't just plunge yourself into the daily life of an English-speaking family, but I do think reading (surely you can find something, textbooks or non-fiction or newspapers, biographies of people you stan, whatever).

The thing about fanfiction is that the quality isn't at all dependable. Of course published fiction has a wide variety of quality, including things that could pass for bad fanfiction (Stephanie Meyer), things that are just plain bad (Dan Brown), and things that actually have grammatical errors that editors apparently didn't bother about. But there's still a baseline level of comprehensibility at least, because they do pass through a professional editor's hands - even if that editor isn't necessarily completely on the ball at all times.

There are some quite long and complex Kradam stories with a very high level of quality, but in every fandom the stories which are similar to published novels are outnumbered by the plebefic - the things that wouldn't make the cut - the slushpile. And if you're reading fic that's full of errors, or even written by other non-fluent non-native speakers, then of course it's not going to help you in the same way. But that said, while reading is the best way to learn the finer points of writing, TV is still probably more useful for language learning. Goes in through the ears, into a different part of the brain, and probably sticks better, unless your brain is quite atypical. I advise you to find some television show that's got like 10 seasons or something and just start at the beginning and go through to the end, perhaps watching while you chat or do other things around the house or something.

[sacredporn]

Aw, triplets! They must be so cute! <3<3<3

I agree with everything you said, it's really cool that you get to learn Swedish that way. I used to work at a company where they also hired people from the US and UK and my English improved a lot by talking to them on a regular basis. But it's been... wow... almost 10 years since I left, and I get tongue-tied whenever I have to speak English nowadays. It's really frustrating and a little sad :(

As for my "lessons", I think I'll pick Supernatural to begin with. Are you familiar with this series? I just wanted to pick something that I can UNF over (the brothers are cute) :D Are there a lot of "heterosexual elements" in the series?

I'll contact you about the fics by PM later. Thanks again for everything, you are so awesome <3

ps. I love Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings too! :D

[cimorene]

Well, haha, Supernatural's first few seasons are really buddy-adventure with the two brothers. For those seasons, there were a lot of incest shippers... I think they both had occasional het entanglements but the show (and the fandom) were really sexist, actually fairly horrible, and the female characters in their lives never lasted long.

Starting with season 4, they introduced Castiel, played by Misha Collins, and Dean/Castiel is definitely the dominant slash pairing now, although in the last three seasons they have also added some female characters in slightly less horrible ways. If you don't mind spoilers, you could read the post I wrote in season 4 when I started reading Dean/Castiel fic:

How To Read Dean/Castiel for People Who Aren't Up on SPN Canon and Don't Want to Be, OR: I Read Shipper Essays So You Don't Have To. But if you are gonna watch the first 3 seasons, I wouldn't read that essay first because it will kind of spoil most of the main plot of at least one of them I think. :D

[sacredporn]

Thank you, but, um, I'm not so sure about SPN anymore. I was going to rent the DVDs from a rental shop but thought maybe I could watch a couple of episodes before the DVDs arrive so I downloaded S01E05. It scared me. I'm okay with vampires / werewolves and whatnot but I could never watch horror movies. The series is called Supernatural. I should have known :(

So. Sorry about that. Do you have other recommendations? Preferably some with good looking guys? :D I thought about Queer as Folk but the rental shop doesn't carry it :/

Thank you! <3

[cimorene]

Not really, no. I don't choose tv shows that way. Or watch a lot of television. Maybe you should choose some that have active fandoms like Stargate Atlantis, NCIS, or Merlin.