Prioritizing Chinese

October 13th, 2025 3 min read

Important Notice for Readers: I moved alexhsu.com/zh to alexhsu.com, and moved the original English site to alexhsu.com/en.

RSS subscribers: English RSS needs to be resubscribed at the new URL

Why This Change? Simply put: I finally figured it out. Instead of clinging to the vanity of having an English-first site, I decided to face reality honestly.

The Multilingual Dilemma

As someone who speaks three languages, my note-taking system is an international disaster zone. Sometimes I write in English, sometimes in Chinese, completely depending on my mood. Often, just because the first word I type is in English, the entire note inexplicably becomes English. Consequently, I often find it difficult to search for my old notes. Also, my thoughts seem incoherent.

What’s even more awkward is that 80% of the books and podcasts I consume are in English, which means my English thinking is actually more rigorous than the Chinese I’ve used since childhood, which I also chose to mainly write in. How is that acceptable?

From my experience developing apps, I learned long ago: supporting multiple languages is a thankless task, and focusing on doing one language well is actually more effective. But when it came to my own website, I fell into choice paralysis.

Two questions that troubled me:

How many languages should I support?
Which language should be primary?

How Many Languages should I support?

The first dilemma was: should I support multiple languages? Should I create a dedicated Simplified Chinese version (zh-CN) for SEO? Should I support Japanese? After all, wouldn’t more readers be better? AI’s powerful translation capabilities inflated my ambitions.

First, I decided I needed both Chinese and English. A personal website can serve as a business card—when meeting people, I can say, “Hey, this is my personal website, feel free to learn more about me.” Chinese and English cover 99% of my needs.

As for Traditional vs. Simplified Chinese, the optimal solution would be to separate them and optimize SEO for each. But as someone with a bit of digital OCD, I really can’t stand having those extra three characters in the URL. Why does it have to be alexhsu.com/zh-TW and alexhsu.com/zh-CN when just zh would suffice?

In the end, I chose a compromise: using OpenCC to automatically convert between Traditional and Simplified. This way, Simplified readers can still read, and my URLs stay clean. Although I’ll lose some Simplified Chinese SEO, I think simplicity is more important. Besides, I shouldn’t care too much about SEO anyway—that’s the algorithm’s game, not mine.

As for Japanese, while it would greatly improve my Japanese skills, I decided to add it later when needed—for example, if I finally write a book and translate it into Japanese. (Dream big!)

Which Should Be Primary? The Vanity of Choosing English

As for the second dilemma, when I set up the site last year, I chose English as the main page (alexhsu.com), with Chinese in a subdirectory (alexhsu.com/zh).

Why? Honestly, it was pure vanity:

“My app is for the world, of course it should be English”
“What if one of my idols stumbles upon it someday”
“Cool personal websites are all in English”

But what happened after a year? 99% of my readers are Chinese speakers, most of my content is in Chinese, and new features are often Chinese-only. For that tiny bit of vanity and possibility, I was making most readers type three extra characters.

Isn’t that completely backwards?