Switching to a worldwide blog

Hacks, Life, Opinioni

you were born of water, by mysi anne.

One of the worst limitations running a blog in your language is that if you aren’t Spanish, Chinese or English, your potential readers are a very small slice of the whole pie.

That is.

So, since I just started to learn some Spanish and I don’t ever wonder to learn a single Chinese word (at least in this life), I decided for the latter.

Like it or not, all the world speak in English, so if you are going to reach everyone, you must write in English.

However there are some exceptions on that. Not all blogs out there aim to be read all over the world, and maybe yours is one of these.

If so, stop reading here and go on with your stuff. But if you think you are writing something useful for everyone, why don’t you really point to everyone?

It’s difficult, I know, but not so difficult.

No, I’m not joking. There are some tricks that can help you (and yet helped me) to accomplish such a task.

First of all read a lot.

This help to acquaint yourself with the new language, especially if you’re a bit rusty.

On the web is far too simple to find something in English to read: news, stories, blogs :P, but I think that books are more effective.

Try to get a book somehow. Better if you find something that you have already read in your language, so is more easy to follow the thread without resorting to a dictionary every time you encounter a new word. But it could be a little bit expensive at the beginning.

You can search for a free e-book to download, but since reading from a monitor is more tiring than from paper, this can lead to a very hard work.

Think in English.

It seem strange to hear, but if you have been in a foreign country for a while, maybe you already know what I’m talking about.

For example, after a while, I find myself, almost unintentionally, thinking about what I’m doing or where I’m going straight in English.

Try to express your thought in English, train your internal voice to speak in English. You will be amazed discovering what you are already able to express, and also you will gradually feel more and more comfortable in building complex sentences.

Use all the tools you need.

In any case, don’t forget to take advantage from anything that can help you, like a dictionary, a vocabulary or if you are lucky enough, you could have a friend that can review your posts.

And also remember that the web is full of useful and quick applications that can help you while you’re writing: in this precise moment I have a browser tab opened on the Italian-English dictionary on Wordreference.com.

As you can see you can embed the search box on your iGoogle start page, or add it to your search box on Firefox (I’ve already wrote about it on this post).

Take a deep breath and… write!

The key is to make practice. But start do it now!

Since your fear to write in a foreign language make you postpone over and over, you won’t write a single word!

There will be definitely some a lot of errors in my posts, but my purpose isn’t to teach you how to write: I’m here to learn too, but I want to give you that little push to start doing it.

If you find some errors, please feel free to point them out in the comment section. I’ll appreciate a lot!

So what are you waiting for?

Tags: blogging, english, writing

Gianluca S. @ 17:01 del 6 January 2009