English or not

I ask myself if native English speakers ever wonder that it costs non-native speakers quite some effort to run an english weblog. Peter Baumgartner just posted some thoughts about this. He would prefer to write in German only because most of his readers seem to be German speaking.

I also run a german weblog that I do neglect in preference for my english weblog (but then I run a whole pack (attention: page takes long time to load!)). I don’t know who is reading my weblog regularily. So here are some reasons for me running an English weblog:

  • I want to be open to non-german speakers (and I think English ist a must in the design community)
  • I practice my English while writing (but I’d need a coach that corrects my mistakes)
  • I have an easier time to incorporate blog posts from other blogs that happen to be mostly English (but then I have a hard time doing so with german blog posts)

I also wonder how English speakers characterize the language difficulties they see in English weblogs (and articles) of non-native speakers. I usually regard the quality of language a lot in German texts and I can’t meet my own quality measures in my English writing. It’s really a problem, but the only option I see to overcome it is to write even more (bad) English hoping that it will magically improve in the long run.

Update: There is a Topic-Exchange channel about multilingual blogging.


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