How many times did you Google today?

Writing in a foreign language is such a daunting task, even with the help of the search engine(s).

In my previous post “Mother’s day,” I wrote “ruin the happy feelings associated with the day,” at the beginning. After Googling, I found much to my dismay that the only result that came out with this sequence of words as search keywords typed in the “exact phrase” field was exactly this site (on Google blog search). Oh.

The Google results regarding the sentence are:
ruin (the) feelings: 20/6
happy feelings: 107,000 (good!)
feelings associated with: 179,000 (good job!)

My conclusion is that the verb “ruin” combined with “feelings” might sound odd as English. And what is worse is that I’m completely clueless as to how weird this combination is.

Honestly, I was elated that I managed to write the whole manuscript of the post without turning to any search engine or dictionary, for the first time since I started this blog; I just jotted down the manuscript on a sheet of paper with a pencil while I was out. I just made a few Google checks afterwards to see if some of the expressions I was not so confident about were appropriate.

Turned out that what I was doing was just translating Japanese sentences in my brain directly into English. This process and the resulting weird English will only hamper not only the writer but readers, if any, from learning English.

As far as this post goes, I made as many Google checks as I did on the other posts. But even that doesn’t guarantee that I have made no terrible mistakes in here.

The part mentioned here as an example of terrible writing is going to be modified as soon as the writer figures out how it can be rewritten.