panharmonium

Hiya again, @travelling-through-worlds​ !  Don’t mind me, I’m just starting a new thread here to continue our conversation from here, since our old one was getting so long - I didn’t want my reblog to totally swallow your dashboard! :)

yessss, I totally agree!  

re: which college I went to - I’ll refrain from naming the exact one, just because I try not to put info that would narrow down my offline identity too closely on a public blog, heh, but I did my bachelors and masters degrees at schools in the Northeast USA.  I do agree with you that the English courses in your area sound a little different than the ones here - often “English” as a college course of study here refers to English literature, as opposed to English language, so you wouldn’t see the phonetics and pronunciation work you mentioned.  You will still probably have the occasional text or class that just doesn’t spark any interest in you; there’s always bound to be something out there we don’t connect with, even if the work might still have some kind of literary merit.  I remember I took one course during my degree (I think it was on post-modernist American Lit and related texts, or something like that) and I hated it.  We were doing Hunter Thompson, Brett Easton Ellis, Tom Wolfe, etc, and I just despised everything we read.  That’s rare for me; I can usually find something to appreciate in most of the “school” books I’ve worked with, but I remember reading I Am Charlotte Simmons and Less Than Zero and wanting to just dump them in a lake. 

Oh, I love Merlin SOOOOO much!  One of my absolute favorite universes of all time (and one of my favorite fandoms, too - I met so many awesome people there!)  I can’t believe it took me so long to start watching it (but then again, I’ve always been really slow about picking up TV shows X) ).  Probably my other biggest past fandoms (besides Merlin and Naruto) have been Teen Wolf and Star Wars, though there are a number of other series/universes that I love but don’t post as much about (Lord of the Rings, DC Comics, House MD, Star Trek, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Fullmetal Alchemist, Gilmore Girls, etc).  As far as books go, it’s hard to choose - a couple of my favorites are Crusader by Edward Bloor, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, as well as the Protector of the Small series by Tamora Pierce and the Animorphs series (childhood favorite) by K. A. Applegate.

I used to, yes!  My masters degree is in education, and I used to be a public school teacher.  Nowadays I work in children’s services at a public library, though.  (I loved many parts of teaching, and the school I worked at was wonderful, but work-life balance became really difficult after a few years, so switching to a less intense work environment ended up being the right decision for me.

Ooh, yes, this is exactly why I think tonal languages are so cool!!!  I have a music background, so I just think it’s so amazing to have languages that utilize pitch changes like that.  (And it’s SUPER cool that you’re able to pick certain words up in the original Naruto dialogue due to occasional similarities between the languages - there are some shared words like that between Arabic and Spanish, too, which it was always fun to see students pick up on!) 

Somehow I didn’t get a notification of this :(

Oh gosh that sounds like an awful course😂 I hope you still managed to get something useful out of it!

I think that the thing with the English courses over here is that, as you described, they treat it more like the study of a foreign language and culture than a language and literature study.

I’ve been thinking this week, and I think I might actually try and apply to study English abroad in a few years, maybe after I’m done with the undergrad :) The university I want to try and apply to has really low admission rates though, but I figured, why not give it another try.

Do you think you should have read a decent amount of classics and literature from different eras to make be a good candidate for a literature study? Because while I’m really interested in the subject and enjoy analysing works of fiction, I haven’t actually read that many literary works when I think about it.

also, that aside *adds all of your favourites to my to-read list* I actually watched Avatar the Last Airbender for the first time during the lockdown! (besides the occasional episode I’d seen as a child on TV). And I’ve been wanting to pick up Pride and Prejudice :D

Oh and I saw that you wrote this really impressive fic for Merlin (which I’ll definitely look at when I’ve watched the series). Are you thinking about writing anything for the Naruto universe in the future?

(re teaching: Being a teacher sounds really nice especially when you have a good working environment, but I can imagine that it’s a job that can get really stressful as well.)

I have a music background too! :D 

That’s so cool! I never knew that there were similarities between those two languages.

(Oh, which reminds me: a few days ago I was looking at some kanji (Chinese characters that are commonly used in Japanese) and I found that the character for white (which I usually see pronounced as ‘shiro’) can also be read as ‘haku’! Which immediately made me think of Haku, and how his name already gives away something about his character (which I never noticed). Thought you might find that interesting :) )

re: reading classics - hmm, I guess I don’t have a super helpful answer to this question, partially just because the definition of “classics” is very subjective.  It’s certainly not a bad idea to read things that are outside your normal wheelhouse (like - I tend to read a lot of children’s and young adult literature nowadays, because I work in the children’s room of a library and I need to be able to advise young people who come in looking for suggestions, but while doing a literature degree, you’re likely to read many more things that aren’t as easy to “connect” with as contemporary children’s/YA lit, and there’s no way to really know if you’ll enjoy working with those kinds of books academically unless you try it.)  I guess maybe the best way to get a feel for if literature courses are something that will really interest you is to try and take a couple classes in a non-degree setting - like, if your university lets you take any electives or something like that?  Or sometimes universities here have Continuing Education programs where you can take a class or two even if you’re not enrolled at that particular school - I don’t know if there’s an equivalent where you are, but that was another thing I thought of.

You watched Avatar!  That’s awesome - it’s such a great show; definitely one of my favorites.

Oh, so cool!  What instruments do you play?  (Or maybe voice?)

re: fic - aha, yeah, I did write a long-ish Merlin fic.  It may not be particularly interesting to you even after finishing the show - it takes place prior to the show’s timeline and focuses on Merlin and a character from his background who doesn’t get much screentime in the actual series - but I had the inspiration, so there it is XD 

And as far as Naruto goes, I hope I can write fic for it!  I want to get a little bit further in my rewatch before I tackle my planned projects headfirst, but I do have stuff I want to make (*knocks on wood, crosses fingers that I don’t jinx my follow-through ability*).