w00kie's ramblings

Switching to English

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by

w00kie
in

I’ve decided that from now on I’ll stop writing in french and switch to english. There are many reasons for that:

  1. More and more of my friends here in Japan feel left out because they can’t read my blog. That language barrier is a bitch…
  2. I love being read by a lot of people and I feel like the growth of this website is is held back by limiting myself to the french speaking community.
  3. As much as I hate hate accents in the french language, I hate even more not being able to type them when I want. It’s ok at home since I brought my Powerbook from France but everywhere else is just plain frustrating.
  4. I used to feel more at ease writing in english than writing in french, but since I moved here and have been systematically lowering my level of speech to get understood by most Japanese, I feel like I’m losing my abilities. I tend to write mostly straight to the point emails and presentations in english at work, so to have more free-pen exercise (such as dribbling on and on about my life) can’t hurt in stopping the slow crumbling of my english proficiency.

I know I might lose quite a few readers in this move, but to hell with it, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. However, I do hope most of you will keep on reading. I’m gonna try translating previous entries but I doubt I’ll have the willpower to do them all.

To conclude, I’d like to say hi to my (mostly american and japanese) friends. I’m sorry it took so much time for you to finally be able to read about my boring life in my beloved ダサイタマ.

Comments

8 responses to “Switching to English”

  1. Moi Avatar
    Moi

    Regrettable… :o(

  2. Kapoue Avatar
    Kapoue

    dont’ worry, “et puis ça apprendrant aux petits frenchies à parler anglais”. But you have japonesse friend who speak english… that’s so rare.

  3. ロマン Avatar
    ロマン

    Won’t you miss the easiness and spiciness (if you still ever feel it / if you have ever felt it, now that you’re far (!) from home) of writing in one’s own language? Or is it that one can feel more comfy with writing in a new language than the native one ?
    Anyhow, keep up the good work…
    Bon courage !

  4. w00kie Avatar
    w00kie

    I’ve never felt that comfy writing anyway, and since I was brought up in an international school with all my classes taught in english, it never really was a “foreign language” to me.

    And of course I have english speaking japanese friends, not that I look specifically for english speaking people but there’s 100% chance that they speak more english than french, whatever their level. So it makes sense for me to write here in english.

  5. bikoko Avatar
    bikoko

    what about comments? do we have to go through a year or so of blogging and translate them?

    Though I feel pointless to translate my useless comments

  6. w00kie Avatar
    w00kie

    no, I don’t care about comments
    actually, I don’t think I’ll translate more than the current first page of the blog
    it’s too time-consuming and it would kill my search engine ratings with hundreds of 404’s (since I have to also translate the post slugs)

  7. sagaman Avatar
    sagaman

    Awww too bad you switched to English, I enjoyed coming here because it was interresting to have a Frenchie write about his time in Japan :P

    I understand why you did it though and I can assure you that you haven’t lost a reader.

    Continuez à écrire au sujet de votre aventure excellente au Japon!

  8. Jenny Avatar
    Jenny

    I’m a native English speaker and I’ve had to lower my English to be understood by people.

    I’ll have to disagree with Kapoue. I’ve yet to find a Japanese person who’ll actually speak Japanese to me. They all want to speak English to me. >_< I did find one though who only knew Japanese and Swedish. So it was great talking to him in Japanese. If I wasn't learning Japanese, then everything would be great. Since I am I've had to start ignoring people's English or only respond in Japanese to them. Sad but true.

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