In which language should I write my posts?
Persian is my mother tongue. I grew up with this language. My childhood memories and the first words that I learned to speak, read, and write were in Persian. For the past few years, I have been living abroad, which measn I do not use the language as often as I did back home. Except for talking with family and friends a few times per week and reading Persian books by my favorite authors every now and then, I do not use the language actively anymore. Language is not static; it changes and grows and expands. The expansion of my persian languge skills mostly stopped as I left home to live in another country. It is easy to write about my everyday life or express my emotions in Persian. But if I want to talk about a current topic, I probably do not have the proper vocabulary for that anymore. It feels strange that I sometimes have to look up the Persian translation for some words.
I started learning english at school as a foreign language. Since learning foreign languages was not a high priority in the school system in my home country, parents sent their children to language schools to learn English. I was not an exception. My english learning journey started in the 5th grade. It took many years to learn the language. Despite learning English for a long time, I do not feel as fluent as I want to be. I can read books, hold conversations, and sometimes write texts, but my vocabulary size is not large enough to write longer texts easily without checking words many times, or sometimes even translating a complete paragraph to English.
Then comes German. I started learning it when I decided to live in Germany. After three months of learning the language, I came here. Then I continued learning, which took a lot of effort especially at the beginning. Now, I speak the language. Most of my everyday life is in German; conversations with friends and colleagues, watching movies and following the news. I read German books, something that my past self would not have believed four years ago. But still I do not feel comfortable enough with the language. To me, German is the language that most of the people around me are better at, and I still need to learn a lot more.
Each time I start to write a new blog post, there is this discussion in my head about which language should it be in. So far, I have chosen English for all of my posts on this blog. I wanted to keep the process of writing simple for myself by not having to make many decisions. Also partly because most of the good blogs I follow are in English. Another reason is that I want to get better at writing English.
The same was the case for journaling. I started journaling in English because I wanted to practice writing in English while journaling. After some time, I switched to Persian. And now, I write all of my journals in Persian. It feels more intimate to write my most private thoughts and daily experiences in the language that I grew up with.
Will I write posts in Persian, or even in German? Maybe yes, or maybe not. I don't know. Let's see how this whole thing with blogging develops. It is a hobby after all, and it should remain fun.