Writing this blog in English — which is not my first language — I got some feedback about my writing, which was not so positive. Some people mentioned the quality of my writing and that there are problems with grammar and the spelling of words. That being sad, I started to think about the reason why I blog English, rather than German and why I write in general?
Why I Write
I always had problems writing something at school and for personal usage. My hand writing is not the best, my grammar and spelling was and still is kinda bad. But the quality of writing does not change if you don’t write. But just writing for my own just bored me. Don’t get me wrong, for me it has value to write down the day at the end in some quick lines but just writing a few lines a day wasn’t enough at someday and I started to write more. Doing that, plus some other reasons, I started this blog (there are more reasons for this blog but not for this post). I wanted to write, I wanted to put my thoughts out there and I wanted to get better writing skills. Even if that means getting critics some days. That’s the why I write.
Why English
I started to learn English in 3rd grade of school. Till now I never stopped learning English – which adds up to now over 10 years learning English at school. But since some years, I have started to train my English even more, especially listening and reading. Why and how I did this is a post for its own, for now the reasons why I train my English, which are pretty obvious. English is the worlds most important language — followed by Chinese? — which means if you can understand and speak English, you are able to communicate with most parts on this planet. You can go to other countries for vacation much easier and you maybe able to someday life in another country — if you want that. All that is — in my eyes — much harder if you can’t speak or at least understand an other language — for which I choose English. In the first place I trained my English listening skills but about 1.5 years ago I started to train my writing skills as well and over the years I have seen an improvement — which makes me happy. At the beginning I haven’t been able to write everything down what I wanted, cause I had just a little vocabulary which lead to problems with finding the right words. For now an enormous part of my life is English. I like to communicate with people from other countries and do that with people from Canada, New Zealand, the USA and Australia, but not just communication is English, I write my to do lists, project ideas, mind maps, code comments and this blog in English, which is nearly half of my days language usage. All that I think makes me better in writing, speaking and using the English voice.
Conclusion
I hope that I made clear why I blog and why in English.
If you have some thoughts, own ideas or an own reason to learn other languages or to blog please feel free to leave a comment.
This post is one of many to complete my about page.
By now I don’t really care anymore whether I am reading German or English text, sometimes i am even having english thoughts ;-)
Of course i’m also not the best english speaker on the world, but I think everyone understands me and for unknown vocabs there is still dict.leo.org :D
So don’t hesitate and go on improving your english skills ^^
I definitely will go on (like I wrote in the post).
And I think everyone shouldn’t hesitate, there is nothing to worry about — just some comments but hey, this comments are there to give you a kick to do even more.
I’m happy to see that there are people out there who think somehow like I.
It really makes me mad when people are mean or critical of someone who is trying to learn another language. I applaud you for trying to learn english. I was born and raised in the USA, but my family’s roots are in Mexico. Spanish was my first language, technically speaking, but I practically learned them ’side-by-side.’ For so long my main focus was technology, but now I’ve found an interest in art and writing, and renewed my interest in playing and composing music. I wish you the best of luck with your foray into english, and I would advise you to ignore the people who do not support you. There are many reasons that people are negative about the pursuits and accomplishments of others, but do know that there are a lot of us out there that wish you the best.
Thanks for the positive response.
And thanks for the reinforcement. I really try to stick to that and as far you can see, I’m doing pretty well overhearing the voices — well sometimes they are constructive end needed for better prove reading and looking out for grammar or spell failures.
And hey, lucky you, I would’ve loved it if I would have had the chance to grow up with two languages. Sadly that wasn’t the case but I hope that I can get over that through doing the things I do to get better.
Thanks again.
da best. Keep it going! Thank you