Last time I wrote a blog post was in August… It’s just a personal blog, so I’m free to write as much or as little as I want, but I still feel bad to have neglected it for so long.
Cycling
One of the reasons why I spent less time writing and reading is because I started cycling in September. I got a new bike, the Giant Contend AR1 2024, and it’s the first time I own such an expensive (and beautiful!) bike, and I can see the difference. I’ve never been into cycling before, I used to have an ordinary bike before and cycling was always hard and tiring for the legs. With the Contend, it’s just easy? I can ride for much longer and faster than I used to without feeling tired. Since I have it, I’ve spent many hours on the road, averaging 500 km of distance in October!
Bike path along the Ara canal that links the Han river and the Yellow Sea. I learnt that this canal is infamous for the many corpses found in it. Last time I went riding there, I saw police banners asking for witnesses (the last case was end of September). It’s a bit unsettling, but the bike path and the landscape are beautiful, so still one of my favourite places to go.
Natlan
Another thing that happened in September is the release of the new region Natlan in Genshin Impact. Genshin is basically my second life, and I love Natlan much more than the previous region we had. As a result, I’ve spent more time in the game than usual, and I have loved every second of it. With the release of Natlan, I have pushed my Chinese study to the next level. I play the game in Chinese, and I’ve been set on understanding all Natlan’s lore in Chinese. This meant a lot of work to get familiar with terms related to the region and customs.
A view of Natlan. The music is fantastic there, and I’m having a lot of fun exploring the region. I’ve only reached 40% exploration because I’m very slow, but I like taking my time, and working on every world quests and NPC dialogues in Chinese does take a lot of time! I’d say that in terms of Archon Quest, I still preferred Fontaine, but as far as region goes, Natlan is my second favourite after Liyue.
Anki
I started a new Anki deck just for Chinese words learnt through Genshin. This deck has now 712 notes, but most of them are sentences containing several new words. Like many language learners, I have a love-hate relationship with Anki, but after testing other methods (like Pleco flashcards), I realised that Anki is still the best way to memorise vocabulary (at least for me). I spent hours and hours working on my card templates. I got sick of my Japanese deck for the JLPT, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake with Chinese. I wanted to add sentences rather than words, but I still wanted to be tested on the individual words. I might write a blog post about it, but for now, that’s how my cards look like.
The new words appear in colour in the sentence, but my goal is to only look at the new words in the list and give their pronunciation and meaning. If it’s hard, then I’ll read the sentence and the context usually helps me. In this case, I’ll choose “Hard” instead of “Good”.
Books
As for reading, I’m continuing my project to explore Japanese authors of detective fiction who started writing in the 20s/30s. I wanted to focus on the pre-war novels and short stories, but ended up reading post-war writings too.
偽悪病患者 by Udaru Oshita (大下宇陀児) is a collection of short stories, and one of the best things that I have read this year. I love this author, and I don’t understand why authors like Udaru Oshita (大下宇陀児) or Saburo Koga (甲賀三郎) don’t enjoy the same popularity as Edogawa Ranpo, both in translation and in Japan. Udaru Oshita is my favourite author among the trio, and I heartily recommend this collection! There are some real gems in there like 「灰人」, 「決闘介添人」, 「悪女」or 「紅座の庖厨」. Generally speaking, characters are central to the stories, more than the plot itself, which I like a lot.
I’m still slowly reading the anthology of Japanese detective fiction, and I am now volume 3. I haven’t finished it yet (there’s still a novel by Udaru Oshita that I’m keeping for later), but I have completed the parts dedicated to Kikuo Tsunoda (角田喜久雄), and I love this author. Most writings were short stories and novellas, but there was a novel that belongs to the Keisuke Kagami series. It’s one of the great Japanese detective novels published just after the war, and it was a really good whodunnit. This made me want to continue the series, which I’m currently doing.
돼지의 피 by 나연만 won one of the Kyobo Story Contest awards, and it’s really good, especially considering that it’s the author’s debut novel (at least I think it is?). I’m usually not a fan of action thrillers in book format (I prefer film and series), but even though this novel belongs to this genre, I enjoyed reading it from beginning to end. I liked the character of Jun’u a lot, his background and the depictions of the pig farm his father ran. I wish the novel had focused even more on Jun’u and his past, but the present was also suspenseful, with a serial killing and body parts found in the Ara canal (yes, the canal with the bike path from earlier).
I haven’t read much in Japanese this past couple of months, but I’m proud of me for finishing this Korean novel. I really want to read more, but I don’t want to reduce cycling because it does have noticeable positive effects on my health (among other things, I used to have frequent and strong headaches, and they almost disappeared). Though with winter coming, I’ll probably spend less time on the bike anyway. As for Genshin, next patch will expand the map, so there will be many things to explore and add to Anki. And just studying Anki everyday takes a lot of time…
But it’s fine to read less and do other things instead. I’ll try to update the blog more often though!
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.
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