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]
