The right language is key to reaching the largest number of people.
As you have seen I chose to write this blog in English. This decision was not explicitly easy for me. Not because of having any preference in writing. By now, English is even easier for me.
But mostly because I wanted to be sure how to best engage the majority of my target peer group.
As explained in the intro in the „home-area“ and in the „about-me-part“, one of the driving ideas behind this blog is to allow my students and anyone interested to have a place where they can read and re-read the material I teach.
In theory the chance of this blog being written in German was quite high. Most of my classes are in German and most of my material as well. And even more important, most of my audiences are native German speakers, same as I am. So writing in German should have been a pretty straightforward decision, shouldn’t it?
Well, no. I saw two reasons for not choosing German:
I said most of my classes are in German. But not all. I give classes to internationals from all over the world. These are young, talented individuals who don’t know a word of German when they start their semester abroad and honestly, they don’t really know any German when they leave after 6 months or a year. German is really a nasty badass language to learn in my opinion 🙂
On top of that, and especially beyond the world of the university, in my business and private life, I know many people who don’t speak a word of German either. No idea if any of these persons will ever read these lines here, but if so, German wouldn’t work very well.
English is a much better medium to travel. What I mean by this is that German is just limited. Comparing the number of German-speaking people in the world ~100 Mn people (German language, Wikipedia) with the distribution of the English language ~2.0 Bn people worldwide (English language, Wikipedia) it is obvious why English has way more potential. Chinese would have been an option considering these statistical arguments, but that’s something I fall short on, at least so far 🙂
So in a nutshell, by writing in English I can reach way more people. And of course I would love my readers to share whatever they like with people I don’t even know. Spreading the word is easier when the word is widely understood.
So I invite you to read and enjoy this post in my best possible English.