Writing in a Foreign Language: How English Gave Me My Voice

This is how I found My Writing Voice and style. I initially read a lot of English books because I didn’t know the language well when I was in CPH and was learning it.

Only after I learned that I enjoy the English Language a lot, even more so for writing.

Also, Haruki Murakami refined and actually found his voice when writing in English, with a very limited vocabulary, and then translated it back into Japanese. So he found his unique and clear voice. Stripped away of all the “nonsense”, just the needed pros.

That was the same feeling for me. English is such a succinct language, and anything can be expressed in one sentence, as precise as German never could. German, on the other hand, is for poets , and it’s hard to write succinctly. English has many more words - in fact, it’s one of the languages with the largest vocabulary.

Everyone has their own Structure of Writing and style.

From Finding My Pathless Path, I wrote about English the Language.

While learning a little bit of Danish, I got fluent in English. With that and reading more books, I was blown away by how much content and books I missed because I didn’t speak English.

I started to fall for language. It was close to my heart. Early in school, I had a hard time reading German and developed a minor reading disability, including difficulty pronouncing the letter s. I had to see a specialist, and it got better over time. But it’s fascinating how I started to love learning new languages, as someone who struggled with my native school language growing up.

Now I write  journal entries and even think in English. It has significantly replaced my mother tongue, Swiss German. In school, I would write in High German (Swiss German is a spoken language only), but English always felt more approachable, concise, and straight to the point. I can articulate what I want to say with precision.

From listening to many  podcasts, most aspiring guests said that their success came from starting to write. That inspired me to follow their paths, which ultimately led me to start writing and, most importantly, share my writing with the  public.

You can see some of my early, embarrassing writing on the blog, e.g.,  The more you share, the more you get, or my first “hit” that motivated me to write more  Data Engineering, the future of Data Warehousing.

I had my first encounter in school, where we only learned in 7th grade, I believe. However, I was looking forward to it even more. Then later I made a Mini Retirements (or retreat) in Australia, where I learned English for 7 weeks at school, and 8 weeks traveling.

English opened the Pandora’s box of knowledge (English books), exploring a life-guiding philosophy called Stoicism.

• Read on Why I Still Blog since I started more than a decade ago.

Origin: Novelist as a Vocation (Haruki Murakami)
References: Writing