After 7 years of blogging in German, I am switching to English. Here is why | Hacker News Reader

After 7 years of blogging in German, I am switching to English. Here is why

meshedsociety.com

69 pointsimartin2k90 comments

I 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.

As a child of German parents I understand completely :-) Even they thought Germans could be a hard bunch.

True.

Because of this I stopped visiting german websites like Heise or Golem.

> where in US/English sites you get 50% joking, 49% niceness, and 1% insight

Please show me this alternate internet!

I 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.

A 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.

As a german and a programmer, i have to say: You call us nitpicky. We see people as inattentive and lacking courtesy to the world around them due to all the mistakes they let themselves make. It's absolutely cultural. Americans need praise or they won't be able to feel good about what they're doing, but they fear criticism because they feel it devalues them. Germans of a certain education level are mostly neutral to praise, because it just confirms that they did the work right; and value criticism because it helps them.

When you see a german being nitpicky, chances are they're either genuinely trying to help, or think the person they're sending the message to was impolite to the rest of humanity in their lack of care.

----

Edit: Thanks for the downvote. Really setting an example of the cultural differences here.* :)

* And yes, this is me being truly grateful. I'm not being sarcastic. (This is me being sarcastic: I love how i need to point this out when talking to english people.)

Just to be clear, I did not mean 'nitpicky' as an insult, in the same way I don't (always) consider the Dutch tendency to speak our minds even when not asked a bad thing. One of the reasons I like living in different cultures is that they show me different ways to do thing, and I've come to greatly appreciate many of the more 'typical' German things.

I think every audience has its peculiarities. What I discovered in an english spoken environment: if you write something destructive, not positive or cheerful (there are situations when this is appropriate), you are almost certainly ignored.

Germans do this a lot. Positive stuff is noticed without comment and secretly nodded to. What germans like is to point at problems. Do that with an english audience and you are dead. Nobody shouts at you (don't misinterpret that as niceness), but you are downvoted, if possible.

The 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).

Checkout 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.

That kind of supports your point though.

You should install a cache plugin. :)

Yep thanks I did that yesterday after my hoster recommended that.

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG...

Despite 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.

Thanks for the feedback. I might remove this if it turns out to be useless.

Sill, one "bad" language is better than many slightly better ones.

Are 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.

I'm told that Italian, for example, has such a regularity that pretty much every word is spelled phonetically, so guessing the spelling always works.

All of the Romance languages are well structured, in stark contrast to English. There is no "GHOTI = FISH" nonsense in them.

Spoken ambiguity and written ambiguity are two very different things and English should not be judged on the merits of the British-English accent.

(You speak of the structure of Romance languages...)

In my limited experience, this is mostly true of Spanish, and nearly for Polish as well (although the latter has a few sneaky digraphs and some regular exceptions).

I'm also told that this is true of German.

> I'm also told that this is true of German.

Not quite. We have a bunch of French loanwords that are confusing to spell, some sounds that blend into each other (eu/äu, e/ä, ch/g), we pronounce a 'd' like a 't' at the ent of a wort (so Germans are perpetually confused if it's spelled Standard or Standart), and our markers for whether a vowel is long or short are pretty inconsistent.

Korean is much better, mostly because the written language was created much later than most so the spelling is all phonetic.

Many natural languages have more reasonable spelling than English. Part of the problem with English is that the language takes a large amount of vocabulary and root words from different language groups.

I speak seven languages. It's easy to see why English got so popular so fast. It is an extremely simple language compared to others and even though it is ambiguous in certain cases, most languages have ambiguity here and there.

Talented English speakers can at least get rid of most ambiguity by themselves, which is something a lot of other languages don't have.

My actual favourite language so far is Swedish. Is it much more raw than English, has less overall ambiguity and has a beautiful ring to it. It is also very easy for a skilled English speaker to pick up and I would recommend it if you are interested in languages. (It also gives you German for free)

>(It also gives you German for free)

That's like saying that learning English gives you French for free. It really helps, but it hardly gives you the entire language for free, just a significant chunk of it.

English does not even sort of give you French for free. It does give you Spanish (and Italian, to an extent) for free though. And I speak of all this from experience.

Oops, I meant French gives you Spanish for free, of course.

Yep I agree, I love the Swedish language too. It is so much simpler than German actually, and I experience the Swedes being capable of a "simple" way of thinking (in a good sense) that I never witness with Germans.

I've found the French I studied to have more consistent grammar and spelling, and less variation in idioms. Its achilles heel for technical stuff seems to be vocabulary, in that new nouns and verbs don't get created, and the Canadian and French maintainers seem averse to loanwords.

I too have gotten used to firing up the developer tools and removing position:fixed. The second-most common thing I have to do is set restricted column widths. I get linked to pages that use a print stylesheet, a lot of the time, and just as I restrict the line length in my text editor, I don't want to deal with that in the browser.

I've not experienced it personally, but I'm told that French grammar gets pretty gnarly after you get past the simpler stuff.

Does anyone know any good fixes for the fixed-header overlap issue?

I noticed it with regard to clicking anchors with links too, and have been thinking about using some sort of separate span positioned X pixels higher than the real target to compensate.

I removed the fixed header. I like it more too, actually.

Cheers. As for the fixed 'return to top' button though I find it actually one of the most subtle I've seen, and appreciate that it uses Javascript over a #top anchor which requires additional back navigation.

I am no linguist, but (I will forgive you if you stop reading right here) it seems to me that from its many linguistic influences, English has gained a relatively simple grammar (if a tragic orthography) in relation to other European languages.

It retains only a vestige of Latin's case system (i.e. she vs her) -- in Latin and some modern descendent languages all or most nouns are fair game for this treatment. Polish has 7 noun cases!

It has nearly no inflection in its conjugation, just a past and present tense for most verbs and an extra "s" in the singular third person: I/you/we/they swim/swam, he swims/swam. Contrast this with any of the Romance languages.

It has no grammatical gender, which makes it nearly unique among European languages.

The remaining strikes against it as I see them are:

* The continued presence of articles (a/an/the). The slavic languages get along just fine without them.

* Some irregular and/or inconsistent rules around punctuation, especially apostrophes and semicolons, and some remaining possessive forms (his/hers) -- these are mostly to get around contractions like he's and she's.

* The whole spelling situation is just a mess.

Edit: Bonus points for removing distinctions between (is, in essence) and (is, in a state) and (knows, information) and (knows, familiarity). In many related languages, these are 4 different verbs (In spanish ser, estar, saber, conocer).

I think you are correct that english grammar simplified because of the intermix with different languages. For example during the viking conquest, many viking words were very similar to english except or their grammatical endings, so people dropped them.

On the other hand, I think the irregular spelling has more to do with English never undergoing a mayor spelling reform: many times, the spelling reflects an old pronunciation. From what I know, England always had a relatively lax and pluralistic approach compared to other European countries when it came to managing its language. For example in France you have the Académie française, which essentially has authority over the French language. There is no comparable thing for English, which is probably why such reforms never took place.

Also, correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to incorrectly assume that English (or at least English grammar) stems from Latin.

Ambiguity in a language opens up a whole class of humor, which probably shouldn't be underestimated in its ability to weasel its way into other countries.

Even 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.

From ~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).

I 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.

You are missing a quite significant '2' on the number of francophones, it's 274 millions, not 74M.

http://www.francophonie.org/Denombrement-des-francophones.ht...

Sorry, 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.

Quite the case with English as well...

Yes, but that was mentioned.

And don't forget that it's almost a winner takes all situation: English isn't my first language but I'd never search nor blog about technical things in a language other than English. I assume most searches from Germany on technical matters are made in English, so the audience for English texts is basically all the people that speak English at all, whereas the audence (search wise) for a German text is only those that speak German but no English. Such people exist of course, but in the technical field they are few.

I 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).

That 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.

Agreed. 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.

Good 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.

The 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.

Yeah, 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.

> 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.

Really?

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 :\

It's very likely that those are very much outliers in the US, IMO.

English 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

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

The 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_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/

I 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.

Interesting 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/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_bilingu...

As well as a few (minor) downsides: 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!

Of 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

I 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.

It's returning a 508 at the moment. I guess that's the ultimate tl;dr

Sorry for that.

No need to apologise. I was indirectly making a point about the popularity of English vs German.

Obligatory Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j74EbmG...

thx of posting

Thanks for* posting (it).

(I normally never correct anyone on HN but it seemed appropiate on this thread.)

You must be German ;) Thx, it was actually just a typo.

I'm actually latinoamerican :)

I 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.

I think is only a "very small thing" if you're the one not learning a foreign language.

I 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.

At 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.

But 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).

Oh 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.

I just published a blog post describing my experience with this HN frontpage entry http://meshedsociety.com/how-a-perfect-launch-day-looks-like...

Related 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?

Probably 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.

"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...

At least in game development, some of the heads of some of the Japanese companies (Nintendo, Sony, etc) struggle a lot with English.

in mechanical engineering german literature is better than english.

Georgy Adelson-Velsky, who invented AVL trees and bitboards for chess software, spoke no English. (See 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.

You should write a follow up: How HN brought my site down ;)

Hope you can fix this soon.

I should have seen this coming. But to be honest, I really did not expect the post to hit the front page. :D

Would you mind to tell your readers what happened? Perhaps others can learn from it.

No I wouldn't at all. Good stuff for a follow up post.

Well his VPS account exceeded his daily/monthly bandwidth limit most likely

My hoster recommended me to install WP super cache to avoid situations when too much traffic kills the site. Gotta do that now.

I 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...

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