A few weeks ago, I recieved an email from my Amercian exchange partner. The last contact we had was about 11 years ago and he wanted to catch up with things over here in Germany.
I found out while reading his mail that he was married, moved to a “cheaper more affordable” but very boring place I can’t even remember and is the proud dad of a 5 year old daughter.
I would have loved to just send him the link to my blog so that he can catch up with my life outside the big facts and just follow my thougts, ideas, things that anoy me and things that strike my mind every now and then. I instantly wondered how blogging in English would help with this.
Whoever knows me a wee bit better knows that it takes some time for me to process such thoughts. While being at a even more boring place than Ben’s deep down in Bavaria for the weekend, I thought about an ex-customer I like very much and whom I’d love to give the opportunity to follow my life as well. Unfortunatelly, Gwenael is a french native speaker (and based in France as well), so we always had to communicate in English.
The main reason I once started this blog is to give people who have an interest in me the opportunity to follow my life even from a distance. This includes ex-colleagues, ex-girlfriends and ex-classmates of mine as well as people I ran into over the years. So, switching the language to give people regardless of their native language this opportunity would be the main reason for blogging in English.
On the other hand, there are quite a few points for sticking to the German language. I have heared (even at the weekend, even from a person I didn’t even know from that he was reading my blog on a regular basis – Hi Brian, by the way) that people like my blog for the way I write. I fear that this “style” will get lost if I use a language who isn’t my native one.
I as well fear that there are a few frequent readers who find understanding written English, especially when not produced by a native speaker more annoying / exhausting / difficult than reading German. And, I am not sure if even all of my readers do understand the English language to a degree necessary to read this blog after switching.
So I am wondering if I should change the main language of my weblog to English. Of course, I wouldn’t like to do that before asking my current readership for their opinion.
Use the comments! You should by now pretty well know how to do so.
[Deutsche Version: Ich überlege, demnächst nur noch in Englisch zu bloggen. Dazu würde ich gerne Eure Meinung hören]
7 Antworten zu “Englisch bloggen?”
As you probably expected I don’t have any problems with english blogs – for the same reasons as yours I switched my blog to english a while ago and so far nobody complained. Most of the people I know understand enough english to understand what I’m writing, and I have more non-english speaking friends than germans anyway…
btw, this ad banner is very annoying. Stupid music…
kathas last blog post..Best Hamburger ever and other german pictures
Ich finde, Du solltest weiter in Deutsch bloggen… und ggf. eine englische Kurzfassung schreiben (auch wenn wir ja eigentlich wissen, dass “sich kurz fassen” nicht zu Deinen Stärken gehört :P)
Kleine böse Fraus last blog post..For Reasons Unknown
Oh, Katha, I figure that you visit my blog through a your iGoogle page. Try switching to Google Reader, otherwise you’ll be treated as someone who comes to my blog through a Google search. And those people see a wee bit more advertisement than the normal visitor does.
I’ll most probably stick with Inka’s idea and go on blogging in German with writing a small summary in English for Ben and Gwenael.
English, German, Kölsch,… I don’t care as long as you stick to a language I can understand without using a dictionary…
Und Dein Englisch schmerzt beim Lesen meist nicht (trotz Ostermann), sollte also alles klargehen. Vielleicht nochmal ein paar Pratchett Romane lesen und die Wortspiele ausbauen? 😉
Anyway, I don’t believe you can write a “small summary” until you prove me wrong! 😉
Nitpicks:
My daughter is 3, not 5.
Raleigh is not boring (likely my email about a semi-typical suburban homeowner / father’s day is what bored you).
Anyways, don’t switch to English on my account. The web translation tools out there (google, babelfish) are good enough to give me the gist of what you’re saying and as a bonus remind me of the German that I studied a decade ago and since had no real chance to use.
Ich würde mich ja immer noch freuen, wenn ich wichtige Dinge aus deinem Leben eher persönlich erfahren würde als von hier….aber die Sprache ist mir gleich.
I considered blogging in english shortly as well, but came to the conclusion that I could not keep the writing style I prefer most, even thought writing in English is not much of a problem for me.
BUt what you could consider, actually, wold be what a friend of mine (towo) does (or did, as is blog keeps spilling 404s), and that is doing both. He writes his posts in English and German most of the time and offers to switch between the languages. Not for all posts, but the most.
Of course, this doubles the effort of writing (at least it would in my case; most of the time I need for writing goes into how I say something, not what), but may be worth a try