Random Fandom Journal

Yeah, learning a language means that the person focuses more on getting things correct grammatically than a native speaker. My MA is in Linguistics, albeit it's been many years since I last studied it or put it to good use. It's definitely different learning a language as an adult or older child in a classroom or other formal setting (including learning on one's own through books and/or an app like Duolingo) as compared to acquiring it as a child as one grows up and learns to speak. Acquisition vs learning. Writing, for example, is technically its own language. It's something that's learned and in linguistics it's separate from the spoken, actual language; letters being pronounced differently than one would expect, or not pronounced at all in some cases (look at French for that, lol). English is an appalling language to have to learn as a second (or third, or fourth) language, but that's thanks to the Norman invasion in 1066. English has characteristics of German and French because of that. There are also arbitrary rules that are applied. I'm not sure if you learned about how you don't split an infinitive (to quickly run is a split infinitive vs to run quickly, which is not split) and you were probably taught not to end sentences with a preposition. Those were all arbitrarily decided because in the 1600s and 1700s (and 1800s to be honest) academics wanted English to be more like Latin. Except that English is not at all like Latin. In Latin the infinitive is one word so it cannot be split and prepositional phrases involve cases like many other languages and have to be in a certain order with the preposition at the start of the phrase. None of this actually applies to English at all. A sentence, phrase, or word is considered grammatical if it is understood by native speakers and is acceptable, even if perhaps uncommon or unconventional; that brings in the whole deal with dialects and that's another complicated area on its own, lol. Sorry to go on about linguistics and languages, but it's an area I still find interesting even if I don't apply it anymore.

I think the deal with the HP fandom is that it's a decreasing fandom. Deathly Hallows was published in 2007 and the movies finished not terribly long after that. New entertainment (books, movies, etc) is coming out all the time, so people find new interests; not everyone, but a good many do. Unless you count the Fantastic Beasts movies (which I don't) and that terrible Cursed Child thing (which I obviously ignore too), there's been no new material since 07. JKR keeps trying to keep relevant and popular and I just can't deal with her anymore. She makes up all this random stuff she could have worked into the books even subtly, but she didn't, so she just interjects online about various characters. I ignore all that. She's had some other views that I don't agree with and made some other comments (she's transphobic and she's not too subtle about how much she favors Gryffindors and doesn't seem to like her Slytherin characters). That's plenty of time for a fandom to shrink down. I accept that it's had its heyday already. Evolving technology and the Internet has something to do with it as well.