Inhae's blog

My Chinese study is more or less entirely based on Genshin Impact, and I know Genshin will remain my main source and motivation to learn the language in 2025. As for my main tool, I don’t see myself giving up on Anki or try anything new. And this brings me to my first and main goal for 2025:

1- 90% retention rate on Anki!

As of today, my retention rate is 83,6% over the past year. My goal is to bring this number to 90% by the end of the year. Most of my cards are sentences containing several unknown words rather than single words, so if I get, say, only one out of 5 words wrong, then the whole card goes in “Again”. It might be harder to achieve a good retention rate with this system (if it were one word per card, this exemple would have one card as “again” and four cards “good”), but I don’t think I’ll change my cards. I really love my current system, and I do think that it works best for me, and that my retention rate is actually better with sentences and context than it would be with isolated words. To come back to my example, if these five words were five cards instead of being connected with a common sentence and context, I might actually get 3 or 4 of them wrong, instead of just one.

What I need to do is just to be more mindful and focused while studying. Making the effort to recall something is hard, and it’s much easier to just hit the “again” button, see the answer and think we’ll do better next time. But then studying Anki becomes much less efficient, because I believe that it’s the act of actively trying to recall that anchors things in our memory, not just having them displayed before our eyes at regular intervals.

Anki goals for 2025 are:

• study Anki everyday!
• constantly add new cards to keep up with my actual schedule of 7 new cards per day
• reach 90% retention rate by the end of the year.

2- Monthly reading goals!

As reading in Chinese is not my priority, I don’t want to set a goal too ambitious (like one book per month), but saying “read more books” also won’t work. What I will do is set reading goals for Chinese each month. I publish monthly goals on Mastodon at the start of each month, but it’s mostly just for Japanese and Korean (and I don’t strictly follow these goals anyway), and I will be adding something for Chinese as well. I started two collections of short non-fiction stories related to crime (one from a criminal psychologist, and one from a forensic pathologist). This format is perfect as the stories are short, and non-fiction is a bit easier to read than non-fiction. I’ll start the year with these books, and we’ll see as the year progresses if I have the courage to add novels.

3- Genshin.

Many things will happen in Genshin in 2025! Lantern Rite is just around the corner, by far my favourite event of the year, and we’re still waiting for new Natlan regions, which means more world quests. Then there will be the Traveller quest that’s always lore heavy and a bit more difficult than the rest, then the Summer event, and 6.0 towards September I believe? I hope my Chinese level will be top notch when 6.0 comes out! ✨

I have several goals with Genshin, but it mostly consists in continuing what I have been doing until now:

• add quests to Anki
• learn the name of all the dishes, artifact sets, weapons, talent books, local specialities, wildlife and maybe enemies as well.

At the moment, learning Chinese is what motivates me the most, and I’m sure it will continue to be so for all 2025. I hope I can discover Chinese authors of crime fiction I like, which would allow me to read more in Chinese and do some more immersion.

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.