Curious and Catcat goes German

Whoa, it just took me almost 30 minutes to scroll through the unread blog posts on Bloglovin'! And that was just to pick out the ones I want to read... eventually. Extended unplugged Christmas holidays do come with a price, ha! They also come with the price of no blog posts since ... forever! When will I learn to make most of my blog post for Christmas season beforehand? Apparently never but I have good intentions.
So here's what happens every. single. year: It's the middle of October. It's 20°C outside, colorful leaves on the trees, the sun is shining, and BOOM! I'm getting a million Christmas orders for cross stitched family portraits out of nowhere and am forced to go in full stitching mode from then on until December 23. Then I take a well earned break from everything until the new year and that's where we are now.  I'm super sentimental about all those cute Christmas DIYs and gift guides that I never had time to write though (awwww glitter projects!).

But the fact that this blog has been hibernating for such a long time (and the fact that it's the new year) makes it so much easier to start fresh and start making some changes (or actually just one super big change) around here that I was sitting on for quite some time now.

That super big change is that I will write this blog in German from now on. I will, however, keep the DIY tutorials and recipes in English and German because I like the idea that people around the world are able to understand and recreate my projects and while google translator may make that possible for most foreign languages as well, it fails miserably translating anything from or to German. It's pathetic, really.

This has been a very hard decision for me. I've been thinking about changing to German for almost two years now but have been putting it off again and again because changing the language of your blog is almost like starting to write a whole new blog. And that is just super scary!

Why didn't I write in German from the beginning? When I started this blog in 2012 there wasn't a very big blogger community here in Germany and if there was I didn't know about it. I was reading exclusively English blogs and I liked the idea that people all over the world would be able to read what I had to say. My English wasn't too bad and I thought the blog could be an extra motivator to improve it further. And so I started my blog in English, like many German bloggers did. And I don't regret it. I've been getting a lot of compliments for my English, not being a native speaker and all. Somehow these compliments make my decision to switch languages even harder. You don't know that, but I'm overly critical with my English writing skills. I always feel that my phrasing is poor, my Grammar slightly wrong and my comma placement totally random. I never felt that I could really and truly express myself in a way that brings across my personality and character. Being complimented and asked where I learned my English helped me to relax more and enjoy writing rather than being a perfectionist jerk.

So why am I still switching to German after all this time? There are a whole lot of reasons why I'm doing it. Some are straight forward like: It's my mother tongue, naturally it's easier for me to write and express myself in German. I live in Germany. Places, holidays, dates and measurements don't have to be awkwardly translated if I write in German. But there's more. I'd really like my parents to be able to read my blog. Read it and not only look at the pictures and guess what it's about. The same goes for my other relatives and friends that are not fluent in English. Also, writing in my mother tongue will be faster than before and with my days being so much busier now than in 2012 that's something that I look forward to. Maybe I'll even be able to get more content on the blog that way. I would like that.

So thank you for sticking with me in English and I hope to see you again on in German sometime!