Inhae's blog

I’ve been playing Genshin for more than 2 years now, and in May of this year, I switched my game to Chinese only, but I was not actively studying it. With the release of Natlan though, things have changed, and I have been seriously studying Chinese since then. Genshin is now my main source to study Chinese, and Anki is my main tool. I also use the Pleco dictionary a lot and watch Chinese content creators, but that’s about it. No textbooks and no classes. Compared to the amount of money I put into Japanese textbooks, learning Chinese is both more affordable and more enjoyable thanks to the game.

Learning a language in association with something you’re passionate about really helps for motivation. For example, I’ve always hated and dreaded cooking and food related vocabulary. Even now, I have to look up words when I follow a recipe in Japanese lol, that’s how much I hate learning vocab related to food. But it’s different with Chinese because I’m fascinated by Genshin dishes. There are so many dishes available right now that adding them all to Anki seems impossible, but I’m slowly working on it.

I learn all kind of words, from weapons to animals and other game specific items. One of the things that I found very difficult was to read characters’ names. At first, I didn’t know the hanzi used to transcribe names and being unable to read them was very annoying. I decided to work on this, and I have been adding NPCs to my Anki. I don’t really want to remember who is who, it’s more to learn once and for all the hanzi that are often used in names. It pays off, because I’m much more confortable with names now 💪.

My main tool for studying is Anki. I got very tired of Anki after the JLPT, and I haven’t really used it since. But I have to admit that Anki is still the best method to learn vocabulary, at least to me.

I created this deck in May, but I hadn’t a clear idea of what I wanted to do with it, and as you can see, we had a chaotic debut 😅.

It’s only with the release of Natlan that I started to add cards on a regular basis, but I was still missing a lot of reviews. Towards the end of September, I worked on my card templates and changed all my existing cards. I’m very happy with my new layout and have only missed two days since then.

At first, I only added words, but it reminded me of my huge JLPT deck, and I hated it 😭. Then I added sentences instead, but I soon realised that I remembered the words from the context, and I was not sure I’d be able to recognise the words if they appeared alone or in a different context. In the end I opted for both. The front card shows me the sentence and a list of words. I first only look at the words and give their meaning and pronunciation. If it’s hard, then I read the sentence. I also added TTS that reads the sentence on reveal. I’m using Edge-TTS because someone recommended it to me on Mastodon, and it’s really great! My favourite voice is Yunxi, it sounds very natural.

I’ve been working with this template for more than two months now, and it’s perfect for me.

I take the dialogues from the quests, (Archon quest, story quests and world quests). Voiced content is the easiest to understand, and I can listen to it as much as I want via the in-game files or YouTube videos. My favourite content creators for Genshin in Chinese are BetterTNothing (Chinese audio and Simplified Chinese text) and Karia Gaming (Chinese audio and English text).

Unvoiced content has been a real struggle for me, because it’s more difficult to understand what characters say without voice to guide the tone, and even convey meaning, and world quests are also lore heavy and full of unknown vocab. I looked for a content creator who would read the dialogues in world quests and found 云子子子啊 on Bilibili.

What I do is that I copy the dialogue from the Chinese wiki if available or from the in-game archive. For unvoiced content, the text is only available while doing the quest, so I have to rely on the wiki. Unfortunately though, I find that it’s often updated quite late, so instead of waiting for it, I prefer to take screenshots while I’m doing the quest.

It’s crazy to think that the function that gives access to the dialogue during quests is a very new addition. I don’t remember when they added it exactly (maybe end of 4.x), but it’s part of the deluge of qol updates we got recently. If it wasn’t there, I would have to wait until the dialogues are updated in the wiki to study them.

When I’m playing through the quest and feel that the dialogue is about to end (it’s often easy to tell), I use this function and take screenshots of the dialogues.

And then I just select and copy the text. It’s easy to do on iPad (that’s what I’m working with). I even created a shortcut for this, but in the end, it’s almost as fast to do it manually, so I often don’t bother using it.

(When you select the text manually, it will often ignore a hanzi if it’s alone on a line. Interestingly, the shortcut doesn’t solve this problem and ignores the lonely hanzi as well. It’s something to be aware of).

Then I just paste the text to Pleco using the “clipboard” function. I can’t remember if this function was available in the free version of the dictionary or if it was in the paid bundle. In any case, this function is fantastic, and I personally think that it’s worth investing into if you are learning Chinese.

Then I go over each sentence while listening to it on YouTube or Bilibili. I add sentences with unknown words to Anki and add the words. I like to copy the sentence from Pleco to Anki because it doesn’t add any tags (contrary to pasting from websites), and the TTS cannot read if there are tags in the html.

Obviously, manually adding cards to Anki is a long and annoying process, but I really love the game and the story, so I don’t mind going over the dialogues multiple times, listen to them and add words. I’m not saying it’s fun, but it pays off. Adding words is already part of the learning process. I select the words myself, the ones I don’t know and the ones I’m not sure of, and selecting the words is the first step in memorising them. Going through the dialogues again also anchors them in my memory, so when I review my cards, I immediately know “oh this is from xxx quest, when we do xxx and xxx says…”, and it helps consolidate my knowledge of the words.

And that’s it. I study Anki every day (or at least I try to!), and I listen to quests again when I have time. While playing, I try to understand everything, which can be very tiring very quickly. As a result, I’m progressing very slowly and it can feel overwhelming. We’re nearing the end of 5.2, and I still haven’t been to Ochkanatlan. I heard that it’s lore heavy, and I’m not ready for that lol. I also have a lot of unfinished or unstarted world quests and tribal chronicles in my log, it feels like I’ll never be able to catch up. But hey, that’s infinite and free language learning resources, so I can’t complain!

I edited my cards layout to add my favourites characters to my cards. Xiao is on the normal cards. He is my favourite character in the game, so seeing him is always a good source of motivation. Leech cards have Hu Tao instead, it fits that her colour palette is red. I have the leech threshold at 4, because to me it’s more a warning that says “you often get this card wrong so focus!” rather than a sign that the card needs a rework.

I post about Genshin and Chinese on Mastodon:

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 with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.

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.