A Little Bit of German

Since I restarted this website, I have been struggling with choosing the right language. Obviously, I went for English so far, mostly because of the simple reason of wanting to get better at it. A secondary reason is that most of the resources for the tech content I write is in English anyway. And if you really want to hear a tertiary reason, I would go with reach. But since I’m not sure whether anyone is reading this, concerns about reach do not apply here.

So lately it dawned on me: Why not switch to your first language—German—and make this whole blogging thing a lot easier for yourself? Because writing in English does cost me a substantial amount of time and effort; it is very different from speaking English and I often lack the intuition whether a written sentence passes as easy to grok, as well-written. That then leads me straight to searching for comma rules, correct usage of tense, and translations of sayings. Somehow I cannot stop worrying about these miniscule details and just write what I want to write about. I am also tired of wondering how readers perceive my tone in writing and whether I come across as intended.

Writing in German would make all of that go away. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure I will make a lot of mistakes in my mother tongue, too. And finding your voice is hard in any language. But it will be easier for me to decide whether grammatical unknowns are negligible or mess with the semantics of the sentence. I could imagine writing… more?! More impulsively?! More personal?! That’s what I’m longing for anyway. And isn’t writing well in your native language also a skill worth maintaining and honing?

Stefan Grund’s blog finally gave me the courage to go with the best of both worlds: Writing in both languages! Not in the strict bilingual sense of translating every note, but as in writing in German when I feel like it and sticking to English when writing about tech or other topics that could benefit from the expanded reach. This might not sound like a huge epiphany, but I am very happy with that decision.

A couple of technical aspects that come to mind:

Am I missing anything? I feel not trying to provide a full-on multi-language website saves me from a lot of problems, like subdomains, changing URLs, etc. There are notes, some in English, some in German, and I will try my best to give everyone the chance to read what they want.

Nice! Expect some good ol’ German here soon!

Tschüssi