
Ask HN: Is it weird to read articles written in English by non-native speakers? - ThePhysicist
I&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;weirdness&quot; of the text might put off native English readers.<p>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 &quot;weird&quot; for your native-speaking brain?<p>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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nmstoker
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?

~~~
ThePhysicist
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.

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gus_massa
[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.]

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frantzmiccoli
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.

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framebit
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...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2016/09/french-vs-american-
comedy-gad-elmaleh-on-stage)

[2] [http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-
rules/adjectiv...](http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-
rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/)

~~~
stevekemp
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".)

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jjgreen
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 :-)

~~~
ThePhysicist
Thanks, happy to hear that :)

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CM30
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.

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notjtrig
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.

~~~
cJ0th
> 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.

~~~
stevekemp
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.

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CyberFonic
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.

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mattmcknight
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.

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SyneRyder
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.

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gpresot
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.

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hkmurakami
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.

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matt_the_bass
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.

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wingerlang
> 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.

