American in Spain

Bilingual Social Networking

January 21, 2011
Spain and USA Flags Merged

As Facebook slowly catches on here in Spain, I've been faced with a dilemma: my Spanish friends want to be friends with me on Facebook, but they don't understand anything I post. And I understand them perfectly. I have some friends that post things in Polish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Greek, and it is a little annoying to be excluded from their communication by my ignorance. Possible solutions to my problem that I see are:

  1. Ignore the Spaniards
  2. Post everything twice, once in Spanish and once in English.
  3. Create two separate accounts: one for Spanish and one for English.

I'd rather not take option #1, because I see the value of social networking and of communicating my wise(ass) thoughts to a broader audience. If you are a friend of mine on Facebook, then you know that I'm a little too prolific and would agree that option #2 would be misery for all. So I'm going to try option #3. It might turn out to be too much work, or generally a terrible idea for other reasons, but we'll see. I have created Spanish alter-egos on Twitter and Facebook. If you choose to follow me on both, be prepared for some redundancy.

¡Vámonos!

Update, May 12, 2011: This project has been cancelled due to reasons explained my post Using Facebook Properly.