Why I keep a bilingual personal site

People ask me whether a personal site really needs two languages. My answer: if you have readers in both, yes.

It is not just translation

Machine-translating Chinese posts into English usually produces something nobody wants to read. Three things actually matter:

1. Structure: each language needs its own URLs, like /zh/blog/ and /en/blog/, rather than a client-side toggle
2. Pairing: the two versions of one article should point at each other with hreflang, so search engines understand they are the same page
3. Strategy: let the languages differ in length — long-form in one, short notes in the other, instead of forcing them to match

The switch button

The switch in the corner should take you to the other language of the current page, not dump you back home.

One detail worth handling: if an article has no counterpart in the other language, fall back to that language's blog index instead of showing a 404.

On writing

Writing is how you find out what you actually think. If you are stuck, it is usually not a wording problem — it is a thinking problem.

My current rule: write in Chinese first, then decide which pieces deserve an English rewrite.

Summary

• Split URLs by language: /zh/, /en/
• Pair pages with hreflang
• Language switching should stay on the current page
• The two languages can move at different rhythms

Get those right and a bilingual site stops being overhead — it becomes a second front door.