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Prompt 5: Blue
Blue is a tranquil color that is associated with a variety of things including: balance, discovery, peace, calm, openness, patience, honor, grace, trust, depression, recovery, prophecy, respect, empathy, flexibility, and water.
In which trace my fandom history through books with blue covers.
As a kid in the pre-Internet Before Times, I learned about books through teachers, friends, or encountering them in the wild, and I spent hours each week in Borders systematically browsing the shelves for titles or covers that caught my eye.
The title and cover for Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three definitely caught my eye. (Jody Lee's work for this edition of the Prydain Chronicles remains among my favorite cover illustrations of all time.) Anyway, I walked out of Borders with The Book of Three that day and inhaled it twice during a YMCA trip. I loved it. Decades later, I still remember where I was as I read individual scenes and chapters in this series--so vividly that I firmly associate individual volumes with specific months and weather and prefer to reread them under similar circumstances.
I was fascinated by Alexander's forward, in which he talked about the series' loose connections to Welsh mythology. I was vaguely aware of Wales as "that place with the red dragon flag" thanks to all the Highland Games I'd been to, but the Prydain Chronicles made it a real place to me. The spelling of the proper nouns looked beautiful and as far as I could tell from Lloyd's pronunciation guide, I thought they probably sounded beautiful too. I wanted to speak Welsh.
"Probably impossible," my parents told me, "but you can take a look at this Scots Gaelic textbooks your mother bought." They probably did it as something of a joke...except I poured over that book until the binding crumbled. And if I couldn't speak Scots Gaelic, I could certainly learned to read it well enough to decipher phrases and sometimes whole sentences in the liner notes to all the Gaelic music albums we had.
My high school had a foreign language requirement, and offered French, German, Spanish, and Latin. I enrolled in the latter, with the reasoning that if Gaelic wasn't an option I could at least learn the language of the empire that had conquered a fair portion of the Celtic language world (to the bemusement of my classmates, most of whom were Roman Catholics in the class at their parents' behest). We used the third edition Cambridge Latin textbooks.
I was good at it. I was really good at it--to the point that the instructor let me work through the second textbook independently while the class was still finishing the first. And really, Latin set the trajectory of much of the rest of my life, because it taught me grammar and how to think in a language vastly different from English, and without either of those skills I would not have been able to tackle Japanese, without which I would never have ended up in the anime and manga fandoms I inhabit. Japanese also opened doors to travel, live, and work abroad...
...which put me in Japan at the height of the Korean Wave. The quality of the English-language Korean textbooks available the time was grim, but thanks to hallyu, Japanese bookstores sold dozens of well-written textbooks for Japanese learners of Korean, with solid grammar and usage explanations.
So I picked those up, and taught myself enough Korean to read manhwa, which helped with listening and speaking, which helped with reading, which helped with listening and speaking in a virtuous cycle until I was proficient in Korean too. And that got me into a bunch of Korean music, TV, and movie fandoms.
Around the same time I discovered the Prydain Chronicles, I also found this book at Borders:
I knew Alvin Schwartz through the Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark series, and so I bought Telling Fortunes too. It had a section on something called "tarot."
My Borders browsing had expanded by that time to include the adult New Age section, because that's where The Mabinogion lived and I was--thanks to The Book of Three--deeply interested in Welsh mythology. It was only a matter of time before I discovered that tarot decks were something I could--and did--buy.
Within a year, I was reading Cynthia Giles' The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore, which, touching as it did on history, occult, psychology, and physics, cemented my love of tarot and opened up a ton of new interests into the bargain.
Blue is a popular packaging color of many of the decks I own. I first heard about Lenormand through the online tarot community; the classic Lenormand deck being, of course, the Blue Owl (seen here peeking out from under Giles).
And so on. ☆
これで以上です。
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I envy your dedication to language. I always claim I want to learn another language, yet I always give up the moment it gets hard. I'm enthusiastic as I pick up a scattering of vocabulary, but then I hit the wall of grammar and my brain sputters to a halt.
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The thing that's worked really well for me is to start learning new languages without actually trying to accomplish anything--I just keep picking up scatterings of things, if that makes sense, instead of focusing on learning XYZ by Date. Even the ones I studied in school I learned much faster when I was no longer in classes.
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Pratchett
The bit about the kid in the bobble hat… and the sword…
Also… "Your piggy did a wee."
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Through a convoluted chain of events, I ended up with a rat familiar in my weekly DnD game. None of the other players understand why she SQUEAKS LIKE THIS, and I admit that privately, I am a little judgey. ;)
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But now that I look at the deck, I like it. Perhaps I just needed to grow into it? I don't know.
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FWIW, even decks I've chosen for myself I like more on some days than others, so it might be worth giving Greenwood another go sometime.
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For the languages, I've found it definitely helps me to not have specific goals, like "must learn X by Date Y", but just pick things up as my interest guides me.
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I'm always impressed by/ envious of people who keep the languages they study. Mine vanish like mist, including the Latin I studied for ten years from age twelve. Languages you learn in childhood are supposed to stay, aren't they?
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I could at least learn the language of the empire that had conquered a fair portion of the Celtic language world HAHAH!!
Also wow-your language journey is so cool! How you got into certain fandoms through the language is awesome! For me I started learning Japanese alphabets/words etc. because I was in the animanga fandoms already. It's a long process so even though I started two years ago, I still can't really read a whole sentence without taking my time.
I do want to learn French properly so I've been planning on checking a french version of the 3rd Harry Potter book since it's my fave and see how it goes!
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For what it's worth, it took me faaar longer to progress with Japanese than the other languages, so I think the initial learning curve is just steeper. But eventually things clicked, so it's worth chipping away at even when you feel like you're not making much progress. :D
Which animanga fandoms were you in, btw?
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Oh I actually came to know about the existence of anime as an actual thing around 2006 so after that I pretty much devoured Cardcaptors, Naruto, Death Note, Ouran high school etc. of that time.
But fandom-wise(reading fanfics,searching for fanarts,creating some myself) I was more into Katekyo hitman reborn, Free!, attack on titan and Yuri on ice! For the most part in animanga I'm more of a reader, icon maker here on DW and on Livejournal but occasionally I draw too. :)
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Yuri is just delightful! And I always meant to get into Attack on Titan, but admit that I haven't read or watched it yet. That's so cool that you make icons, though! I have only the most basic PS skills...
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I remember reading the Chronicles of Prydain at some point in my life, although it didn't leave as much of an impression on me as it did for you.
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The Chronicles of Prydain a really well written, but I think it's also due to when I read them--at the time, they were some of the longest books I'd read, and certainly the longest fantasy series. So they were basically my introduction to the genre.
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Oh, it's neat those were your introduction to the genre. That sounds like it was a good setup for later, good materials as well.
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