Why blogging in English.
I have to answer a concern that seems to bother some folks. Why do I blog in English when I am a native and every day French speaker? I am a French Canadian. I'll explain…
First of all, English is international. I think I may reach a larger public that way. I might be the only one who read my blog, but its make me feel good that I might reach people and share my thought and discuss about it. I am not blogging about my personal doing or feeling. My blog is not a diary. I see my blog more like an editorial to react about event, news or comments I saw or read.
Writing is my mind work out. Sitting and thinking about every word I put on paper takes time and required processing. Changing a word there, a sentence here or punctuation up here to tune my text, asks for concentration. All of that makes the exercise as much truer when you are writing in a secondary language. One time I heard about international wine competitors required to express their thoughts on wine product in a language other then their native one. This way the Organisation make sure that every participant are on approximately the same level of ease. I thought it was a beautiful and legit idea. I try to exercise my mind once a day. Go see Joe Janson's comment on "WoW" to see where I find the time to think about my blogging subjects. Remember, I am working in front of a computer screen all day long to ;). I always have an open notepad to sketch my none-work related idea.
My blog enable me to practice my English writing, something that I am not use to in my every day tasks. My text might not be errors free or with rich sentences or vocabulary but I aspire to become better at it. I hope! We don't have to be shy of making mistakes if it's to improve ourselves. Btw, there a lot of tools for word processing that can help you do it. (http://translate.google.com/)
Try it yourself you will see.
1 comment:
Why English? I'll tell you why. Because Zelda is in english. And Dragon Warrior. How can you play video games if you don't have a functional english vocabulary? I was young and I had a Nintendo.
You cannot be a real computer programer if you can't read in english. Period.
It turns out that I don't speak chinese, russian, vietnamese, or Italian. I have a non-functional Spanish and German vocabulary. Yet I need to communicate with people from all over the world on a regular basis. Guess how I do it. Turns out that English is da shit. Oh, and for all you intellectuals wanna- bees that don't like the United States, English != USA.
I was at a theatre play once, a cool minimalist play called "The making of MacBeth". It was a play about a bunch of actors trying to set up a play. And there was this topless chick in it, she was hot. But that's not why I mention this. The play was bilingual, French and English. There where French characters, and English characters. Sometimes you had bilingual dialogs between French and English characters, each spoke in their own languages and still could communicate in a very charming matter, it was awesome. It was sexy. At some point during the play, a chick explained the difference between French and English: you speak French with you mind, you speak English with your balls. And I know it's true. The language I choose to write in depends on the mood I'm in. I guess that's why thetrap.org is bilingual. Some languages are more appropriate for the things you want to say.
I really enjoy speaking with perfectly bilingual people, because then you can start a sentence in English, finish it in french, and it still makes perfect sense. It's better this way because then both language complement each other. There are gaps in both, missing words and expressions.
Oh, and the money is in English. If you write software and want to make money off it, you need to have it in English. Have it multi-lingual if you want, just make sure that English is in there.
I can hear the french-orthodoxes yelling at me that I should defend my French heritage and promote it online. Listen to me: you are a bunch of racist fucks. Only instead of beeing scared of other skin colors and religions, you are scared of other languages. Things that you don't understand scare you, and that is perfectly normal.
I love French, I really do. I speak it well to honor it. But I realised a long time ago (1995) that the internet is English territory, and there is nothing wrong with that. Having an internationnal language brings humans of the world together, so wtf is wrong with that?
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