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

Multilingualism Is Beautiful

I’ve had one of those wonderfully serendipitous encounters today, that I wouldn’t have had if I wasn’t maintaining a personal website and wouldn’t be interested in other people’s websites: I went to the Discover section of Bear blog—which is one of my favorite ways to discover new blogs—and stumbled upon Pablo Enoc’s project lettrss.com. I checked out Pablo’s website, subscribed to his RSS feed, and decided to submit my own site to his other project powRSS.com. If you have a personal website, you should consider to submit yours as well; Pablo is a very friendly fella and your site would be in great company. We exchanged emails and I got the chance to ask him, whether me blogging in both German and English was confusing to him.

No not at all! I myself write in Spanish and English too, I think it’s great to see more multilingual blogs. It goes to show how international the web is and breaks that monotony of universality that platforms have accustomed to. It’s always great to see posts in other languages, if anything browsers and devices have gotten great at doing on-device translations and it’s always exciting to see what one can find.

This post from Ruben at Kedara says it better: https://kedara.eu/more-multilingualism

Pablo already makes some great points and Ruben’s post knocks it out of the park for me:

Multilingualism is beautiful—I personally believe different languages enable a larger variety of thoughts.

I especially enjoyed Ruben’s open-minded and wise approach towards languages. He makes both a case for English as a ubiquitous, global language with the potential to build bridges and for using our first language more often to escape uniformity. I got to exchange emails with Ruben as well and he took the time to read my thoughts on the subject and even some of my German notes.

It seems that sharing in two languages is a lot less confusing and limiting for people than I had feared. That’s a great insight and I am thankful for having e-met Pablo and Ruben over this topic. It’s a good day!