I’ve been thinking for a while about starting a new blog to practise my languages. What I can’t decide is whether to have one new blog on which I post in various languages, or to have one for each language I want to practise. Another thing I can’t decide is what to call the blogs. Any ideas?
The course is going well, we’re speaking plenty of Welsh and we don’t have so much homework tonight.
I think making separate blogs for each language you want to practice would be a good idea. I think that would make things a bit better for your readers. While someone might want to read your Welsh writing, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’d want to read your Chinese writing, for example. At least from my point of view, I’d probably not read a blog that had all sorts of different languages going on (unless it just so happened to be German and Russian, the two languages I’m currently studying 🙂 ).
By the way, did you get my email about the new Welsh newspaper that’s launching in ’08?
Yeah, I’d have to agree that readers probably will just find the “non-interesting” languages distracting. Of course, if readers are of secondary (or no) concern then put it all in one place. But, I think you may get some benefit from seeing your ideas and thought processes follow through in one language from post to new post.
Suggested names:
Mandarin Machinations,
Mandarin Musings
Czech This Out!
Welsh Wishes,
Whiling the hours away with Welsh
Japanese Junkie
French Fantasies (sure to bring in plenty of net traffic 😉 )
Manx Mania
Turkish Delight,
Let’s Talk Turkey (American expression),
Turktalk,
Turktext
Idle Irish
Scott Free,
Scotland Yarns,
Literary Scones for Scotts.
Language of Arabia,
Articles of Arabic
Polish Posts
Polished Polish
Portuguese in Motion
Russian Ruminations
Russian Nights (on second thought…)
Russian Reveries
Language for all Seasons
Please don’t call a Czech blog “Czech This Out.” Far, far too cliche. They have shirts all over the Czech Republic that say that.
Just remember not to spread yourself toooo thin by doing that! 🙂
you might have lot of things to take care of and no time at all!
You could have blog posts in different languages in one blog, and use ‘categories’ for each language (basically as you do now).
As you use WordPress, people who read your blog via newsreaders can subscribe to the feed of a particular category. (Nic already does this to specify which posts are also available in English on his blog which is otherwise all in Welsh.)
Another advantage of this, is that you could request that your feeds to Welsh posts appear on y Blogiadur
For those visitors who don’t use newsreaders and prefer just having a link in a blogroll from their own blogs, they can just put a link to a particular language category, rather than to the blog itself.
I would suggest having just one blog and each time you want to practice a specific language you could post in that language. I don’t see the advantage of having a blog for every language. Unless of course you are MAD about one language and will write in it a lot and it would overshadow the other languages. So have a blog for one language and another blog for the rest seems fine but I imagine it would be a headache to have a specific blog for each language.
Afterall you do pretty well with segmenting this blog into catagories as it is.
@Simon, why don’t you just put your non-English writing here? I know this contradicts what I said earlier, but I’ve noticed on the forum that people (like me) will even try to decipher sentences in languages they’ve never studied. You can even include an Enlglish translation with each post…if you are so inclined.
@jdotjdot89 Please don’t call a Czech blog “Czech This Out.” Far, far too cliche. They have shirts all over the Czech Republic that say that.
LMAO! They do??? I wouldn’t have thought they’d know enough English in E. Europe to come up with that. That’s hilarious!
Thanks for your suggestions. I’m kind of inclined towards starting a new blog that’ll be entirely in Welsh, the language I most want to practise, and to keep this blog mainly in English, with occasional bits in other languages.
Josh – I did get your email.
Polly – having taught in Prague for a year, I can concur with jdotjdot89 about the T-shirts. They are mostly worn by groups of Brits on ‘stag-dos’ rather than by the local population.
With regards to their language, because the people are so used to having either oppressing, or simply economically stronger neighbours, their ‘learning culture’ involves becoming proficient at at least one other language. Interestingly, I found that the older generation spoke Russian, the middle-aged folk spoke German, and the younger spoke English!
Either way, I would agree with jdotjdot89 in not using that name for a blog – too cheesy!