Why I Write in English

My English Is Not Perfect. I'm Writing in It Anyway.

Let me get the obvious thing out of the way: English is not my first language. I make mistakes. My sentences are sometimes too short, sometimes too stiff, sometimes just slightly off in ways I can't always identify.

I'm writing in English anyway. Here's why.

The Audience Problem

When I write in Chinese — specifically Simplified Chinese — I am, by default, writing for the mainland Chinese internet.

That audience is enormous. It's also exhausting.

I don't mean the people. I mean the environment. The platforms that shape what can be said and what spreads. The reflex toward outrage, toward tribalism, toward the performance of opinions rather than the actual examination of them. The way nuance gets flattened the moment it touches a feed algorithm optimized for engagement.

I've watched smart people write careful, honest things in Chinese and watch them get buried, misread, or weaponized. I've watched the comment sections of thoughtful posts become battlegrounds over things that weren't even in the post.

Writing in English doesn't mean I'm writing for a perfect audience. It just means I'm writing for a different one — smaller, more self-selected, less pre-loaded with the specific grievances I'm trying to stay away from.

It's a filter. Not an elegant one, but an effective one.

Language Shapes Thought

This one is harder to explain, but I believe it.

When I write in Chinese, I notice I reach for certain framings automatically. Certain rhetorical moves that feel natural in Chinese carry assumptions I don't always want. Certain ideas feel more or less sayable depending on which language I'm reaching for.

Writing in English forces me to rebuild sentences from scratch. I can't just run on autopilot. That friction is annoying, but it's also clarifying. Slow writing is more deliberate writing.

There's a version of this that applies to reading too. I read most of my technical content, most of the writing about technology and culture that I respect, in English. Writing in the same language as my sources feels less like translation and more like continuation.

The Practical Reason

A lot of what I write about — terminal emulators, AI tools, macOS workflows, American TV shows — has its natural conversation in English. The communities, the documentation, the people thinking carefully about these things: they're mostly writing in English.

If I write about Ghostty in Chinese, I'm translating a conversation that's already happening in English, for an audience that mostly doesn't need the translation, with all the lag and distortion that implies.

Writing in English lets me be part of the actual conversation instead of summarizing it from a distance.

What I Lose

I'm not pretending this choice is free.

I lose fluency. There are things I can say in three Chinese words that take me a paragraph in English. There are jokes that don't survive the crossing. There are moods — particular textures of thought — that I haven't figured out how to carry.

I also lose reach, in the narrow sense. Fewer people will read this. My distribution is essentially zero either way since I don't promote this blog anywhere, but in Chinese there's at least a theoretical mass audience. In English, I'm writing for an indefinite small number of people who happen to find this.

That's fine. That was always fine.

This Blog Is For Me

The real reason, underneath all the others, is simpler.

I write to think. The blog is a place to work things out — to understand a tool by explaining it, to understand a show by writing about it, to understand what I actually believe by having to commit it to sentences.

The audience I'm most writing for is myself, six months from now, trying to remember how I configured something or what I thought about something.

If someone else finds it useful, that's a bonus. If it happens in English, that's fine too.

The language is secondary. The thinking is the point.