Ask HN: Is it weird to read articles written in English by non-native speakers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it weird to read articles written in English by non-native speakers?

16 pointsThePhysicist20 comments

I'm wondering whether to primarily write articles in German (my mother tongue) or English. For me, the advantage of writing in English is that I'll potentially reach many more people with my writing. The disadvantage (in my opinion) is that the quality of my writing will probably not be as good as when writing in German, and the occasional "weirdness" of the text might put off native English readers.

My question to native English speakers: Do you mind reading articles written by non-native speakers (given it is clearly noticeable in the text)? Do you have any recommendations for us to make our writing better or less "weird" for your native-speaking brain?

My question to non-native authors writing in English: How do you handle this? Do you think it impacts the way your writing is received by native English readers?

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So long as you can get your point across clearly, that's the key thing of value to the audience and what they should be grateful for.

Being a German speaker, you're in the fortunate position that the kind of occasional give-aways that you may have in your writing tend not to sound bad to native English speakers.

That's not necessarily true of people with much less closely related languages, where the mistakes can be really distracting and confusing. It tends to cause the worst impact when the writer's confidence far exceeds their actual ability and they do things like utterly misuse clichés.

The fact you've asked this is very thoughtful. Your question text above is clear and well written, so I don't think you've anything to worry about and would encourage you to give it a go (provided you feel comfortable and it isn't a burden).

Purely out of curiousity, I would be interested to hear how it goes - is it something that might be posted here in due course?

Thanks for that feedback, I'll keep you updated on my progress and will make another post once I got the first articles out! I'll write about privacy & data security engineering for startups, among other things.

[Hi from Argentina!]

I usually write the articles in Spanish and English. The English version usually has 10x move visits than the Spanish version. So I strongly recommend to write the English version too.

Also, I can read in Spanish and English, some Portuguese and Italian, and a little of French and German. I had some formal education of German in primary school, but I don't remember too much. Each one has a different set of languages, but most people understand English and something else.

In many cases, it's clear that the author is not a native English speaker. I try to pass some spelling and grammar checks to minimize errors, but they are not perfect. For technical blog posts it's not so important, and you may get a few friendly emails with corrections.

[Anyway, while reading articles written by native English speaker, I sometime find errors like using "then" instead of "than" that are annoying because it absolutely doesn't make any sense in the Spanish version. So, being an English native speaker is not always 100% safe.]

I think that what you have wrong in your question is that the question is not to write for a native speakers audience but for an audience.

To that regard most perhaps non native will not be able to tell the difference in English.

As for your second question, my more fictional / creative writings in English often get corrected for sense or grammar. I never heard the slightest criticism in a more technical / teaching. I know that my weakness is too use to complex sentences, and so I try to avoid them.

Native English speaker here. For me the weirdness of the English used is entirely dependent on context.

For technical writing (scientific papers, technical blog posts, documentation) what matters is the clarity of the ideas and the science/design behind them. My brain is aware that I'm not reading literature. As long as the English is competent enough, I will readily forgive any weirdness. I will judge you more on your actual API or your actual science than your English unless I truly cannot understand what you've written, which is rare.

If you are writing a novel or doing standup comedy[1] or some other form in which the presentation is important, the weirdness of ESL English will be more apparent. My own status as a monolingual, in my mind, still leaves me little room to judge other's language skills, but I will notice more.

FWIW, English is absurdly complex and I cannot imagine the difficulty of learning it as a second language. For example, I just learned about adjective ordering[2] recently. It's true that, as the example says, I need "three good reasons" rather than "good three reasons," but I knew that purely through intuition rather than being taught. That kind of fine tuning must be maddening to master as non-native speaker, and I have nothing but admiration for those who even come close.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2016/09/french-vs-amer...

[2] http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectiv...

English is complex, but it's not unique in that regard.

Polish is "hard" due to genders and cases. English is hard because it is irregular, and it has a lot of loan-words which compound the problem.

(Not that regular verbs make life easier, even languages like Finnish which are genderless and very regular have complications to make life "fun".)

Thanks for that great feedback! Adjective ordering is a very interesting topic not only in English (we have that too in German), as I read quite a lot of English texts I think that I have a somewhat good intuition about that though, what's more problematic sometimes is how to structure sentences in general (German is famous for very long sentences in which the last word will often change the meaning of the whole sentence).

I certainly don't mind, generally it's the information that I'm interested in. In your case, I could not tell that your English was non-native :-)

Thanks, happy to hear that :)

Nah, it's not weird. I mean, tons of blogs and websites I read are by people who learnt English as a second language, and many of the people I subscribe to on YouTube aren't native speakers either.

Heck, most of the time I don't even notice they're not native English speakers until I come across the location field on their profile or an article where they talk about their personal background.

But yeah, if you can get your points across clearly (without the kind of stilted wording found in machine translations or works by people with only the most rudimentary knowledge of English), then you'll be fine. Most people won't even notice you're not a native speaker.

As a native English speaker I often don't notice the subtile differences that could be pointed out as weird.

Everyone has a different writing style, I'm not sure anyone could pick your writing out as being from a non-native speaker but it does stand out slightly.

IMO people who write English as a second language tend to write longer drawn on sentences than someone who writes it from birth. We take pride in shorter, informal, more concise ways to speak, even if it's lazy.

I don't mind reading articles that are noticably from a non-native speaker, it can be very beneficial reading an author with a different background and in technical writing, longer formal sentences is a godsend.

> IMO people who write English as a second language tend to write longer drawn on sentences than someone who writes it from birth. We take pride in shorter, informal, more concise ways to speak, even if it's lazy.

I (non-native) have noticed that too. Native speakers taking pride in shorter sentences is one thing. But for me those shorter sentences are not intuitive. I can't really tell why. I suppose I try being extra careful to be comprehensible.

When I watch something like 'The Simpsons' I am amazed by how simple every day sentences can be. For instance, something like "Can you stick it in the refrigerator?". That's pretty close to what I'd literally say in German. But if I had to ask that question spontaneously in English then I'd use way more words.

I'm slowly trying to get better at this, now I'm regularly using a foreign language. The difference between "I'm Steve" and "My name is Steve" seems to be a little jarring for some people.

Not all native English speakers write well. When reading articles written by non-native speakers I can often work out their primary language from the idioms that they translate into English.

You don't mention what level of articles you are asking about. If you are writing articles for top level academic journals, then engaging the services of an editor or having an competent English writer as collaborator is a very good idea.

In a more informal setting you could always enlist the help of people interested in your topics to review your writings before publishing them more widely.

It is distracting to me if there are many errors, and I feel it may bias me to trust the author less. Usually what throws me off the most is the misuse of prepositions, where switching 'of' and 'to', for example, in a way that changes the meaning. I remember from learning German that different prepositions are used in different circumstances than they are in English, even though they seem to be the same word. In any case, having a native English speaker edit your article can mitigate this.

I agree with most of the other comments that you'll get a wider audience with English. It isn't just for native English speakers, but everyone who uses English as their second / interchange language. (When I was last in Europe, I saw Swedes, Dutch, Icelandic & German people all speaking to each other fluently in English. It's a de-facto Weltsprache.)

But why not write in both? Write your articles first in German, and translate the articles that become popular into English.

Without knowing the gap between your german and english writing it is difficult to give an answer. Personally (I am bilingual), there is for me a threshold of grammar and syntax accuracy below which an article looses credibility. What I would do if I were you is write in German and publish and then translate in english the articles with best reception (visits, number of comments...). Translation can be done by you directly with some support from google translate (if your syntax and grammar in english is decent, you will be able to spot and correct the worst bits of the Google output). Or it can be even done by a professional if this is sustainable economically (I hear that cost per word is quite low these days). This approach has the bonus that you will structure your storyline and syntax in your mother-tongue: this will generally be much better than a first version written in a language you don't master. Also, while english will give you a larger audience, it also gives you a larger competition.

Honestly if you write as well as you are in your OP, you'll be fine.

Design your website so that there's a small profile of your in the top right or top left where you can prime readers that you're a German.

It's often frustrating for me to write in Japanese (since I feel that my English is much less stilted), but most readers have had nothing but positive things to say about my style. I imagine you'll feel that your English writing will be stiffer and less fluid than your German, but if the objective of your articles is for you to reach the largest audience with your writing, then English is the way to go. If you want it to be an avenue of expression for you, then German may be more suitable.

How many native English speakers would read your writing if it was not in English. I’d guess close to 0.

So the question becomes do you want any readership from native English speakers or not.

Side note, my wife was formerly a PHD student in French literature. She was kinda annoyed that she was encouraged to write papers in English. The reasoning was to gain a larger readership.

> and the occasional "weirdness" of the text might put off native English readers.

If it is occasional it won't put anyone off. If is barely legible throughout the whole text, it will.

I'm not a native English speaker (or writer) but I would not consider any other language than English to write in. Or read in for that matter, it has some kind of "off" feeling to it for some reason.

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