Quote from: Ken S on December 23, 2025, 08:52:29 PMWhile you are reading this, may I ask a favor? Although I am a US native English speaker, I have some long ago background in Spanish and German. I am sensitive to the frustrations our members who are not native English speakers may have on the forum. The forum has grown from a primarily US based English speaking community to a much more global community. I welcome this growth, although it also brings some "growing pains". I would welcome any suggestions you might have to make the forum more multilingual friendly. You may post them or send mea Personal Message
I've been around discussion boards from the early days of the internet (usenet...) until today (I got my first permanent (!) connection from my home to the net in 1995, with superfast 64kb/s...) English is by now the "lingua franca", and nearly everybody (with some technical background) is more or less fluent in it. My native language is German, and there are german speaking boards about knives and grinding them. However, I feel discussions there tend to turn into esoteric regions with more or less connections to the real live. I read through several threads here and think the contributors here are a little more down to earth. I appreciate this approach ;-)
It is not easy to fill a board with lively discussions in several languages. Anyone who is into a technical/practical hobby like this should at least be able to follow the topics in english, so no direct advice from me. One could however keep a list of native speakers somewhere in this board to have someone to talk to if the language capabilities are not precise enough.