I started playing Genshin Impact in October 2022 but only really started actively playing during the Lantern Rite event of 2023, so it has been more than a year now.
It started playing for the open world, because I just love games where I am free to do whatever I want, like running around and collecting resources. The fact that I can do all that on the huge map of Teyvat is what made me love the game at first, but then, I started to really enjoy the main and side stories, as well as the characters. I am shocked by the quantity of lore and stories that are present in the game! When you start digging, it just never ends, and I find this fascinating. It also feels like each region has its own history and system, and they do feel like different nations, not just different landscapes. And of course, the music is fantastic, and it has also become one of the reasons why I love this game so much.
As for characters, I have been a Xiao main since his banner during Lantern Rite 2023, he is my first limited 5 stars and my favourite character.
Overall, this game is so diverse, it feels like different games in one, and I love every aspect of it, from Abyss to the teapot and TCG. One of my new hobby lately is to take in-game pictures and use them as reference to draw illustrations for this blog.
I started playing the game in English with Japanese voice-over, but I did not enjoy it that much. Then I switched to the Chinese voice-over, and my experience of the game changed radically. I find the performance of the voice actors truly fantastic, and going through all the quests in Chinese made me want to learn the language, and this is how I started learning Chinese.
So I have been playing in English with Chinese voice-over for a year, but recently (during 4.5), I switched my game to Chinese only. I was very hesitant because I love the story and all the world quests, and I didn’t want to miss anything. But at the same time, I was doing all the non-voiced content in English, and I was relying too much on subtitles during the voiced stories.
It has been a month now, and everything is going fine! (Hopefully I didn’t trash any good artifacts in the process though!). The first content I did entirely in Chinese was the Alchemy event. It was perfect to get started because it does not have a lot of dialogues, and there is a lot of recurring vocabulary. Then I did Lyney story quest, which I found surprisingly easy. I am now in the middle of Arle SQ, and I am going through the events of 4.6 in Chinese as well.
Overall I would say that story quests are easier than world quests. It might be because they are voiced, which helps to capture the tone of what is said. I guess that world quests also contains more new words and explanations given that they introduce a new area, so it’s not surprising that they are more difficult. I’m glad that I did the Aranara quest in English, I don’t think I could have gone through it in Chinese :]
I do switch back to English to read long texts like characters story or books. I also switch back when playing TCG, because reading cards in Chinese is really hard, and I don’t want my opponent to have to wait when I check out abilities.
Genshin is the reason why I started learning Chinese, and I decided to create an account Mastodon to post about the things I learn while playing. It is on a single user instance, a bit like a mini blog. I’ll be happy to meet fellow Genshin players and Chinese learners there!
About
I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.
Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk to people, etc. and for a long time, I thought I was weird to learn languages just for me, just to enjoy media, culture and entertainment in a foreign language, with absolutely zero interest in communicating with natives.
Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.
hey ! just came around your blog and i love it ! i am a beginner in chinese and korean and i wanna learn japanese as well , what books would you recommend to a beginner , i can speak mostly anything even the difficult words but the writing and reading part gets the worst out in me , would really appreciate the help !
Hello, thank you for your comment!
I think that graded readers are great to start reading, but I don’t know much about them. I can recommend some novels that I found easy to read:
Japanese: If you don’t mind horror, 変な家 by Uketsu is one of the easiest books I have read. The end gets more complicated, but the first 2/3 of the novel are really easy.
Korean: 습기 by 마태 is a psychological thriller I read recently, it has a lot of tension and is mostly about everyday life, so I found the vocab to be relatively easy.
Chinese: I haven’t read a lot in Chinese, but 无证之罪 by Zijin Chen was very easy. It feels similar to The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino.
Good luck with your readings 🙂