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After 7 years of blogging in German, I am switching to English. Here is why
- edoloughlin 12y agoIt's returning a 508 at the moment. I guess that's the ultimate tl;dr
- imartin2k 12y agoSorry for that.
- edoloughlin 12y agoNo need to apologise. I was indirectly making a point about the popularity of English vs German.
- imartin2k 12y agoThe fact that the site immediately goes down after it hits HN frontpage of course is a bit embarrassing. Sorry, and thanks checking it out. (here is the feed URL in case you wanna subscribe http://www.meshedsociety.com/feed http://www.meshedsociety.com/feed).
- gedrap 12y agoCheckout Octopress. It generates HTML pages from markdown and you can host it in e.g. S3. When I hit HN or /r/programming homepage a few times in the past, there were no scaling / performance issues and I paid maybe $0.5 for S3 for that day.
- austerity 12y agoThat kind of supports your point though.
- marcelweiss 12y agoYou should install a cache plugin. :)
- imartin2k 12y agoYep thanks I did that yesterday after my hoster recommended that.
- q_no 12y agoYou should write a follow up: How HN brought my site down ;) Hope you can fix this soon.
- imartin2k 12y agoI should have seen this coming. But to be honest, I really did not expect the post to hit the front page. :D
- duggan 12y agoObligatory Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG9pCIJ:meshedsociety.com/fighting-the-language-fragmentation/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG...
- imartin2k 12y agothx of posting
- Max_Mustermann 12y agoThanks for* posting (it). (I normally never correct anyone on HN but it seemed appropiate on this thread.)
- imartin2k 12y agoYou must be German ;) Thx, it was actually just a typo.
- Max_Mustermann 12y agoI'm actually latinoamerican :)
- daliusd 12y agoCached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG9pCIJ:meshedsociety.com/fighting-the-language-fragmentation/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=lt http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG...
- petercooper 12y agoRelated question: are there any luminaries in the HN-oriented fields of programming, open source, startups, or general tech who are well known in the West and do/can not speak English at all?
- imartin2k 12y agoProbably everybody can read, but some would not feel comfortable talking maybe. And I also know several people who prefer to read tech news in German instead of English.
- mhd 12y ago"at all" is probably not that likely, at least in the programming sector, but "not well enough to blog" is pretty common. Heck, it's common enough amongst native speaking bloggers...
- lentil_soup 12y agoAt least in game development, some of the heads of some of the Japanese companies (Nintendo, Sony, etc) struggle a lot with English.
- doczoidberg 12y agoin mechanical engineering german literature is better than english.
- dalke 12y agoGeorgy Adelson-Velsky, who invented AVL trees and bitboards for chess software, spoke no English. (See https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Georgy+Adelson-Velsky https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Georgy+Adelson-Velsk... for how he spoke no English.) I don't know about Evgenii Landis (the "L" in "AVL"), much less the other great Russian-speaking computer scientists from the 1960s (Levenshtein? Karatsuba? Brudno?) because it's really hard to find that information, and "at all" is a very low barrier. After all, I speak a few words of lots of languages, including "Good Morning" in Venda.
- programmer_dude 12y agoI think this is a step in the right direction. Germany has a lot to offer to the world at large. I hope others take a cue from it and understand that a small thing such as language must not be allowed to come in the way of universal co-operation and brotherhood.
- Max_Mustermann 12y agoI think is only a "very small thing" if you're the one not learning a foreign language.
- programmer_dude 12y agoI am not a native English speaker. I understand it may not be the best natural language out there but I hope you agree that if any language is close to being the universal language on this planet then it is English.
- nyir 12y agoAt least it is at this point in time. German is also so close to English that I'd say it's one of the easiest switches, at least for reading/writing.
- imartin2k 12y agoBut German is highly complicated, and there is the common convention that if you do not speak perfect German, you cannot really be successful in whatever career you chose. From my observations that really is not the case in the English-speaking world (correct me if I am wrong).
- nyir 12y agoOh sorry, I meant as a native German speaker instead writing/reading in English. And agreed. At the same time, if more people were to use German and therefore also the percentage of imperfection went up, I guess that effect would then disappear in the long term.
- vegabook 12y agoI always find it refreshing to read blogs in languages other than English (in my case, French), because my sense is that points are expressed in often subtly different ways, thoughts where a different emphasis is possible only in the medium of the language used. It would be better if the english speaking world were to speak more languages (wishful thinking I know but the point is that something is being lost in this unification of language).
- imartin2k 12y agoThat is a fair point. Different languages allow for different thinking and expression of contexts. But I think in the end the language fragmentation is still a luxury with a huge down-side. Especially nowadays, when most problems are global ones that need to be solved jointly, not isolated. I could be wrong of course. Maybe a world with fewer or even only one language would be a horrible place. But maybe it would be better. I think it is worth taking the risk.
- vegabook 12y agoAgreed. Also one can argue that the fact that English may not be the first language will in itself have an effect on the thought process, even if English is the medium used. So in that way we still have some diversity, if only obliquely.
- spacecowboy_lon 12y agoOf course not that long ago (within living memory) in certain fields you had to learn German and publish in that language. I am thinking of chemistry in particular
- maaaats 12y agoI live in Norway, and was almost forced to learn German at school: "It's the language of engineers!". That was maybe true when their generation grew up, but I haven't had use for it in a professional setting so far. So yeah, you're right.
- blfr 12y agoEven when your posts are minor, and strictly technical, like tips on doing this or that with Linux, they will be often searched for with English keywords and publishing them in English increases your potential audience tenfold. From ~50M people in a large European country to 500M English speakers worldwide.
- icebraining 12y agoFrom ~50M people in a large European country You're forgetting to count everywhere outside of Europe that speaks an European language (besides English, of course). Portugal has only ~11M citizens, but Portuguese is spoken by 220M people around the world as their first language. Same with Spanish (470M) and French (74M).
- swah 12y agoI wouldn't dream of writing something for the larger audience in portuguese - although I could rehash ideas that are only found in english, in portuguese. That would be an easy way of getting karma points with my fellow citizens, and learn things better, which always happens when you need to explain something. I should start doing it.
- informatimago 12y agoYou are missing a quite significant '2' on the number of francophones, it's 274 millions, not 74M. http://www.francophonie.org/Denombrement-des-francophones.html http://www.francophonie.org/Denombrement-des-francophones.ht...
- icebraining 12y agoSorry, I took the number from Wikipedia. That said, does that include all French speakers? The number I mentioned was specifically about people for whom French was their first language.
- serve_yay 12y agoQuite the case with English as well...
- a_bonobo 12y agoI used to blog in German for a relatively large German portal and stopped because I couldn't stand the commenting behaviour by Germans - where in US/English sites you get 50% joking, 49% niceness, and 1% insight in German you get > 80% nitpicking and complaining, especially hard when we played around and experimented with (un)gendered nouns in German. Killed all the fun for me, Germans are strange.
- coldcode 12y agoAs a child of German parents I understand completely :-) Even they thought Germans could be a hard bunch.
- k__ 12y agoTrue. Because of this I stopped visiting german websites like Heise or Golem.
- Svip 12y ago> where in US/English sites you get 50% joking, 49% niceness, and 1% insight Please show me this alternate internet!
- stdbrouw 12y agoI think we're talking about professional blogs and niche content in particular, not news sites or Reddit. I've also noticed that Americans are generally more encouraging of new ideas, even if they're not fully thought out and a bit wacky, whereas when I used to write similar stuff in Dutch, I always got a collective "meh". Part of it is just the fact that more readers almost automatically equals more encouragement and sharing, but I can't help but think culture has something to do with it too. Of course, Germanic nitpicking can have its benefits too: there's not as much irrational exuberance about everything that's new.
- mercer 12y agoA very common cause of conflict in multi-cultural groups that I've been part of, professional or otherwise, has been the German and Dutch tendency to nit-pick and the particularly Dutch tendency to give advice and criticism whether it's asked for or not. I think there's definitely a cultural component to it.
- mantis369 12y agoDespite English being my native language, I am sorry that it won. There is a lot of ambiguity in it, whether you are writing on technical matters or not. And what is with this scourge of position:fixed headers lately? I like to scroll with the space bar or page-down button, and the header always slightly overlaps the top of the new page, preventing me from reading a couple of lines.
- imartin2k 12y agoThanks for the feedback. I might remove this if it turns out to be useless.
- austerity 12y agoSill, one "bad" language is better than many slightly better ones.
- philh 12y agoAre other human languages significantly less ambiguous than English? (Conlangs like lojban, sure, but anything used by more than a handful of people?) Genuine question, I haven't studied any other languages since I was sixteen. Fully agree about position:fixed. For long articles I often remove them in the DOM editor. I wish browsers would change page-down distance when there's a fixed header, but I recognize that this is a tricky problem that would have horrible edge cases.
- mattgibson 12y agoI'm told that Italian, for example, has such a regularity that pretty much every word is spelled phonetically, so guessing the spelling always works.
- CapitalistCartr 12y agoAll of the Romance languages are well structured, in stark contrast to English. There is no "GHOTI = FISH" nonsense in them.
- imartin2k 12y agoMy hoster recommended me to install WP super cache to avoid situations when too much traffic kills the site. Gotta do that now.
- k__ 12y agoGood thing. I sometimes got the feeling, that the german language culture is a blessing and a curse. I like how everything gets translated and dubbed for us. But it feels like most Germans simply ignore most of the stuff, happening outside of Germany. I even know many IT people who claim they don't need to know english. But I got the feeling that not knowing how to read and write english just keeps you far away from the bleeding edge. You can see this when looking at german companies, most of them feel like 1999.
- nyir 12y agoThe downside of all the dubbing is that the translations (and arguably speakers) are horrible and also the benefit of free lessons in language comprehension disappears unlike for countries were it's not feasible to dub lots of movies.
- kossmoboleat 12y agoYeah, I'm so happy about the German Netflix, where you can easily switch to the original audio. No other VOD site in Germany has that AFAIK.
- mgoesche 12y ago> But it feels like most Germans simply ignore most of the stuff, happening outside of Germany. Having lived in various different countries like the US, Germany and the UK I would say that Germany is the one country that cares the most about what happens outside its borders compared to most countries.
- k__ 12y agoReally? Whenever I read about the organisation structures of US companies (valve, base camp, etc.) I feel like working in the last century here with german companies. As if they don't even notice what's going on out there :\
- Max_Mustermann 12y ago
- informatimago 12y agoI guess this only proves Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk wrong. At least for now. AI is so lame, that it cannot translate satisfactorily simple blog posts. And this after 55 years working on the problem of automatic translation...
- baldfat 12y agoEnglish is easily the lingua franca of the new age due to SECOND language. Some refer to English as an international language (EIL) First language speakers rankings: 1) it is zho (Chinesse) 1.19 billion, 2) Spanish 441 million, 3) English 335 million, 4) Hindi 260 million and 5) Arabic 235 million http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size Secondary Language Speakers: Only 1 out of 4 English speakers are first person speakers. That makes English the most known language in the world. http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content
- adambard 12y agoThe other relevant metric is the distribution of speakers. Most of the speakers of Chinese live in China, but English is a significantly common language in 67 countries by Wikipedia's admittedly questionable estimation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_widely_spoken_languages_(by_number_of_countries%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_widely_spoken_lang... I don't think the data is entirely trustworthy -- it seems unlikely that "Turkic" is spoken substantially in Lithuania -- but I did some analysis based on this data anyhow: http://adambard.com/blog/what-language-should-you-learn/ http://adambard.com/blog/what-language-should-you-learn/
- realusername 12y agoI would more refer English as "the language to communicate internationally" rather than "the international language". The distinction is quite important actually and people speaking English as a secondary language are generally dealing in some way or an other with international business (this is also the case of computing). The proportion of secondary language is really unequally distributed. When you go out of these domains, the number of speakers drop really significantly. The truth is most people will never speak English in any ways because they don't need it on a day to day basis, the real world is not exactly reflecting a business lecture where everything is international.
- junto 12y agoInteresting timing choice; Just as the CSU in Bayern decide that all people living in Germany should be forced to speak German at home: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11278764/All-immigrants-should-speak-German-at-home-say-Merkels-allies.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/112... Most German people I meet seem to think that my children growing up in a bilingual German-English household is great, "your children are so lucky", "they have such an advantage" is a phrase I hear a lot. It just seems that German-Turkish isn't thought of in the same way, but is it really so different? Surely the underlying benefit of a bilingual upbringing is about future opportunity and earnings potential. Whether that be that you can earn money from business opportunities inside a sizable Turkish population (both internal in Germany or in Turkey) or a very large external English speaking population, are both valid. On top of that, bilingualism has many other benefits, namely cognitive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingualism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingu... As well as a few (minor) downsides: http://www.multilingualchildren.org/getting_started/pro_con.html http://www.multilingualchildren.org/getting_started/pro_con.... Overall, most people think that being bilingual is a good thing. The bottom line is that whether the author wants to blog in German, or English (or both) or Klingon, is entirely his choice. Hopefully that choice should be the authors for the foreseeable future!
- imartin2k 12y agoI just published a blog post describing my experience with this HN frontpage entry http://meshedsociety.com/how-a-perfect-launch-day-looks-like/ http://meshedsociety.com/how-a-perfect-launch-day-looks-like...