Let’s get this straight. I have been living in London for past 6 years and my English still sucks. Do not get me wrong. I can understand 95% of conversion and I can usually tell what is in my mind. But when it comes to writing the result is very bad. I have been blogging for past 4 years and it did not seems to help me a lot.
I get this message quite a lot. “I like your design but your bed grammar just spoils it”
. I know the person is right. What can I do about it?
There are so many of us out there trying to be web entrepreneurs. Thinking about business ideas and learning various web languages so we could actually execute. The competition is huge. So here comes the point. I am trying hard, very hard. I mean, I am trying hard to learn all the possible web languages which can get me where I want to get but I am not trying hard to learn English. Why? Simply because there is not that much time and it is not where my passion is. English is my second language and despite the fact that it is one of the easiest languages it is still hard to learn it properly. I am curios how much does my language devalue the message I am trying to present?
It must be quite difficult for English or American people when they came to a site which does not use proper language. The incorrect grammar must destruct the user and the overly feelings is probably not the same as it would be if the grammar was right.
I can’t test this on myself in Slovak language because we have almost no foreign people living in Slovakia and not even blogging (or writing) in Slovak language.
Just to stay positive at the end. I can see from my analytics data that people come to visit my blog from the whole world so English is for them second language as well. I guess it is not such a big problem for them, but maybe I am wrong. Their English might be lot better so they might not enjoy it.
Solution
I am working on my first commercial web application right now and I am seriously considering to hire copy-righter to get the messages out in a correct way.
Do you have experience with it? What is your thought about it?
Comments
I’m American and I don’t care.
English is my first language. I mess up all the time.
I don’t care when others display bad grammar. I feel they would probably not care catching me showcasing my poor english skills.
There’s a time and place for everything though. If you tried writing a novel set in the old West, I think grammar would be more important then than it would be on the internet.
You are allowed to make mistakes on the internet. I think that’s the point
Hey, if you are paying so much attention to detail, then how come the blog message is impossible to read with Firefox? It scrolls way past where I want it to and I can’t get the in-between-bits.
As for your question. You can do an Adult English language course and improve. I know many people for whom English is not the native tongue who have improved dramatically and their income and recognition as well.
Like they say… No Pain, no Gain! So the ball really is in your court.
@Mel Thanks for your opinion. I wish everyone would see it as you do ;)
@Joe I am sorry to hear that. I need to make the javascript scrolling a lot better. (It also scrolls down even there is no more content, which is not ideal.)
I’ve lived in London and in the US for a while and English is my third language (after Romanian and German). I’m quite proficient in English, not as good as my mother tongue, but I understand everything that is said to me and my vocabulary is quite extensive; however my accent is east-european with no doubt.
What I’ve found out is that while american’s are a lot more insensitive (tolerant?) to broken accents the British absolutely can’t stand it. They avoid talking to people with bad accent and will generally walk away form any conversation with somebody of a non-british accent. I’ve observed this with brits around the world, not only in the UK and for sure it’s not related to talking among conationals only: generally they are willing to engage in conversations with people that are obviously not british as long as they speak proper english with proper accent.
Of course you can not generalize the above to every brit in the world however this is my observation.
About blogs I observed in a comparative study that pages not ending in .com are just a bit less likely to be clicked.
About a written message, what can I say? If the English is badly broken I get annoyed too. If there are minor spelling mistakes it does not bother me, substance prevails over form.
Thanks @Timur for your opinion.
I have to say I do not have a bad experience with English people. I am actually very fortunate that I have a lovely colleagues who accept my English.
The only criticism I get on social sites and via email. But as long as they are right I cant really complain.
This blog post is certainly quite acceptable, grammatically.
Different audiences have different reactions to bad grammar. Financial professionals are put off by it, while teenagers expect it. Are you building ETrade, or MySpace? For something like ETrade, that’s a handicap — get an editor or a copywriter. For something like MySpace, you’re fine.
Thanks @Noah!
I am building project management application. I expect it to be used by freelancers and small companies. I guess it would be better if I hire someone.
I hope good copy-righter could help me to present the service in the right “light”.
There isn’t an easy answer to your problem. If you were in the United States, I’d tell you to take writing intensive courses at a community college, but from what I understand no equivalent to communities colleges exists in Britain.
The key to learning more about written English is having someone edit and/or grade your writing, rather than solely blogging, which isn’t going to help you as much without someone to consistently edit your stuff and point out problems. That’s what community college writing courses are good for. If you can find a university course or something like it, take that, and explain your motivation to the instructor.
You should hire a writer. The big danger is doing so is that if you’re not a good writer, it will be hard for you to judge the writing of others, just as it’s hard for hackers to judge the skill of other hackers. If you can find a native English speaker to help you evaluate potential writers, do so.
Great advice @Jake. Perhaps there are even some online courses. I will have a look.
You are right about the copy-righter. I would not be able to see the difference. I could check their references or someone could recommend me one so I could minimize the risk a bit.
I wouldn’t say that English is an easy language. The grammar superficially seems simpler than e.g. Slovak, but in fact there are an enormous number of subtle and sometimes contradictory rules that apply in different situations, often with significant effect on meaning.
Your English isn’t very bad; it’s all comprehensible, and the worst thing I can say about it is that it reads like you’re writing things in your head in Slovak, and translating as you type. Many of your prepositions are wrong, and you miss out a lot of articles. As I’m sure you know, these are arbitrary things, and they seem particularly hard for people coming from Slavic languages: but ‘in school’, ‘at school’, ‘at a school’, ‘in a school’, ‘in the school’, and ‘at the school’ — all of which I think would be v škole in Slovak — all mean different things.
You don’t need to make it your passion, but I’d recommend reading novels (and other ordinary prose of the kind that you don’t find in technical manuals) in English to learn this stuff by feeling rather than by rules. There’s sometimes some vague logic to why you say ‘in the park’ but ‘on the football pitch’ but ‘at the pub’ but ‘in the street’, but for the most part I think this kind of thing is most easily learned by ear.
And as for text in your application, I would *absolutely* recommend hiring a copywriter or at least a native speaker (who can write; most people can’t) to fix your rough draft. While your writing is perfectly comprehensible when given normal context, messages in software typically call for a lot of weird grammar that’s not really used in communications directly between humans, and minor ambiguities can cause serious confusion.
Thanks a lot @Tino!
You are absolutely right. I always struggle with those sort of things you have mentioned “at school, in school” and so on.
I used to read Sherlock Holmes and other stories from Green library when I came to London to improve my English. Then I found my passion in web design. Since then I have not read any non technical content. It looks like I will need to come back to it.
Thanks for the advice!
hire a copy-writer, and maybe take conversational english classes. ALso, your site design is super slick, but not very user friendly.
Thanks @rbrc!
I am aware of the fact that I am pushing the user experience into new areas specially in this post page.
I usually got one-two line comments so the comments layout was OK but I can see it is not really working when the comments are longer. I might switch the default comments layout. I am not sure if you have noticed the layout switcher in the top right corner. It is a bit of experiment, I just did not want to create another Wordpress blog which looks like 90 percent of the blogs out there.
I think that grammar and spelling is important, but I think it’s easy fixed. You should just get me to proofread your stuff for you. There you go, free service!
Thanks John!
One of my friends has already helped me with the pre-launch page.
I will send you some stuff as build other parts of the app.