A lot of bad ones. Creature!Harry fics tend to include it as Harry's inheritance, meaning anybody else of the same species has it. I remember one example of Snape having the ability. Numerous fics imply that it is a learnable language, having anybody from Dumbledore to Charlie Weasley learning it. And 'Unlikely Heroes', which has numerous things wrong with it. THIS particular story started off readable enough before launching into crazy-town. In this one half the 'main' characters speak it.

 

You might be onto something, I'm Finnish so my native language doesn't resemble anything of latin origin or much else really. So I haven't noticed that at any point in school.

As for thinking, I either do it totally in English or Finnish, they don't mix, I guess it's because of the totally differentgrammars

But when I decided to spend a few months in South America with just really basic Spanish I found myself mixing English words in almost automatically when I was getting lost for words. The next month after the trip when speaking English I accidentally kept mixing some Spanish words in.

So I'd posit that it's a combination of how closely your native tongue resembles the other one and fluency

 

Sequels set before the first story's epilogue.

I read something the other day (Not My Destiny, MLP story on Fimfiction), where the first story was finished early January, and the sequel started mid April.

However, the second story is (apparently) centred on the events mentioned and told in the epilogue of the first one. So the basic plot is already known, as is one of the larger plot twists.

just something that irked me.

 

Breath/Breathe

just.. no.

 

I'm in Malaysia (south-east Asia) at the moment, and have been for a month. It used to be part of the British Empire until about 50 years ago. According to guidebooks most people speak English, but thats complete bullshit.

Weirdly though, when listening to two native Malay speakers talk to each other, they often throw English words in here and there. And I'm not talking about garbled English like Promotion/Promosi, Restaurant/Restoran or Go Ahead/Gohed, but untranslated English words. So with some languages you do throw in other languages here and there. And its not a similarity thing- Malay is based partly on Arabic which is completely different to English.

 

Are those words for concepts for which Malay did not have words (internet and stuff) or does their native language have perfectly good words for these things and they still use English, as if they're speaking in a pidgin instead of Malay?

The Russian language (which is my native language) incorporated a lot of foreign words, sometimes these foreign words displace local words from their natural habitat, with the indigenous words sometimes going completely extinct. Nationalists and other enthusiasts then try to keep them alive in language zoos or revive them. It is said that the borrowing is cultural exchange in which a lesser culture borrows words from the dominant culture, mostly with new concepts but sometimes not. At different times, for Russian, the dominant culture was the Golden Horde, much later Prussia, France, Netherlands, Britain, and currently, as everywhere else, the US. In recent times, regular English words enter Russian the way MBA-speak enters colloquial American English. People who want to sound posh say "reception" instead of the perfectly fine native-Russian word for the same thing, the same way some people in the US say they want to touch base about closing the loop on leveraging off the shelf deliverables to monetize the low hanging fruit of out of the box thinking in our core competency.

 

A bit of both I think. Sometimes they even shove in entire English phrases now and then to people who otherwise don't speak English. I mean, I really do not believe that a peninsular country joined to a large island has not experienced piracy, or roadside bandits in its history. They have words for that. But when talking about roadside banditry they will use the English terms "highwaymen" and holding their hands like pistols use the phrase "stand and deliver" to make sure people understand what they mean.

Although I have a feeling it could be like how pretentious idiots shove French they don't understand into their words to give their speech that little "je ne sais quois", or how the job title of "barista" is even a thing.

 

Stories that insert random bits of other language into speech annoy the crap out of me, i tend to spend most of the time i read the story trying to translate what they mean.

 

Bro, if you don't sort out your correct capitalisation, I'm going to have to send the boys round.

 

Bored/Board


Dear Lord! I am going to murder someone next time I see it.

 

This is kind of petty and pedantic, but the misuse of apostrophes really gets to me. It happens most frequently regarding names. Also the use of "anyways" instead of "anyway". Many otherwise well-written fics make these errors, which is probably why it's so distracting.

I see I'm in the minority here, but sometimes I do enjoy reading about Bastard!Dumbledore.

 

It's not that we don't like it. It's that virtually every writer out there can't portray Dumbledore realistically to save their life. They just throw in hundreds of "My boy" and a "Alas" and think they've got him down. (By the way, that's my pet peeve for this entry)

"Alas, my boy, Snape needs to teach you how to do this stuff," said Dumbles.

No, seriously, I read that somewhere.

If they even think to include any motivation for the Bastardness portrayal, it's so incredibly cliche it's pathetic: robbing his vault, or using Harry to make himself look like the hero. It's boring and poor writing, both of which have no place at DLP.

I have read one or two semi-evil Dumbledore fics that actually work, but the writer took a massive amount of time behind the scenes to show how it worked into canon. Or perhaps it was in a different universe/time travel fic or something like that. The rest was crap.

 

I don't like it. :awesome

 

This kind of antagonist is an insult to the reader, I've always found those you can either respect or sympathize with, the best kind of villains, a petty Dumbledore is neither. I remember reading a blog entry by Jim Butcher about how to create a credible enemy, he's a guy that clearly understands that.
In a way a misguided Dumbledore can be even worse, too often he's just portrayed as an old fool that has misunderstood everything of importance, or is just too stupid to research properly. Cue for an unspeakable to save the day!
Sigh...

 

I totally forgot misguided or senile Dumbledore.

Granted one would think that a person of Dumbledore's age could suffer from some sort of dementia/ Alzheimer's/ whatever , just having him be stupidly goofy and inept doesn't cut it.

 

I'd like to see a fic where Dumbledore is a bit like Father Jack from Father Ted.

'Albus, Voldemort is attacking Hogwarts!'

'Feck!'

 

"Professor Dumbledore... did you forget to take your potions again?"

"Why do you ask, Harry?"

"Because those are Professor McGonagall's robes. And you're standing in my bathwater."

 

Stories that have characters like Flitwick and Dumbledore saying "Sure" every fucking sentence, I just hit the close button whenever I see any of the characters use the word "Sure" now.

 

Good thing Dumbledore never commented on Voldemort being sure of himself in canon. I'm sure that would sent you over the edge. Surely?

 

It's not terribly common, but goddamn it bugs the shit out of me when authors don't start a new paragraph when changing speakers.