Inhae's blog

I thought I would do some 2025 recaps for things that were important for me this year, and one of the major new things is the start of a gaming journal for Genshin Impact.

I did a gaming journal in Japanese when ACNH came out to record what happened on the island and what I was doing everyday. But because I decided to write it in Japanese, the task became soon daunting and I was always doubting myself. ACNH released in 2020, so it was five years ago already, and I never did another gaming journal since.

Starting a gaming journal for Nod-Krai and more importantly, stick to it for so long (more than 3 months!) is definitely my biggest achievement of 2025 (this and reading consistently in Chinese) 😄🥳

Possible spoilers: this post contains images of my notebooks that are filled with notes and drawings related to Nod-Krai exploration.

My ACNH journal was a standard Midori A5 notebook, so I felt very bad when I dropped it because I only filled just a little portion of it. So for the Nod-Krai journals, I chose the thin Midori notebooks of 48 pages, and I’m so proud to say that I completely filled the first one and almost half of the second one.

The see-through is very pronounced as you can see on the second notebook… but it’s okay. I gave up on the idea of making things perfect, and it’s much easier to get going that way 😌

The notes are just personal notes on the various world quests I did. I’m not worried about the weird formulation or spelling errors. I almost never read in French anymore, and I don’t live in a French environment, so I realise that my spelling has become very bad. Sometimes I just don’t know how to write words anymore, and I’m too lazy to check, and sometimes words just don’t come to me at all, that’s terrible… 😩

I sometimes do a world quest over several days, so I’m taking notes to remember what the quest was about. Though to be fair, Nod-Krai quests have been rather short, but I remember that Fontaine and Natlan have had very long quests, and the lore feels kind of blurred to me because I did them over the course of several months lol. Especially Natlan that I played in Chinese, it was so confusing at times…

I’m not good at drawing faces, but practice does help. As long as they are easily recognisable, it’s fine. I tend to forget very quickly who is who (names are especially hard to remember), and NPCs we meet during a quest often don’t really appear again, so I like to draw them so that I can associate them with each quest when I flip through my notebook.

I love using the Monami pen for drawing, because drawing with a ballpoint pen feels a bit like using a pencil. I don’t do pencil outline and starts directly with the pen, but it’s possible to cheat and draw light lines first, and then they kind of just disappear when the drawing is complete. However, I must admit that I hate using this pen when writing. I feel like the nib is never where I expect it to be, so my hanzi kind of look funny (not that they look perfect with another pen but it’s better I think?), and writing in English or French is just not a great experience, but that might be because I’m used to writing with fountain pens so the downgrade is too brutal? And the Monami’s body is very thin, it’s really not fitted for long writing.

But I just like the idea of “one pen, one notebook”, and proving to myself that I can do nice things with a cheap pen and that I don’t need to buy tons of fancy stationery (though I still tend to do that anyway 😅).

I also started another notebook where I don’t have tools restrictions. I still don’t know how I will use it, maybe to take notes about the game that are not strictly related to Nod-Krai? I wanted to do some lore recaps somewhere, because I feel like I’m constantly far behind, even though I read everything. I keep reading the wiki and keep forgetting things anyway, so having key concepts, important characters and a simple timeline somewhere might be useful. Hopefully I can prepare this before going to Snezhnaya.

That’s it for this post, I’m thinking of doing a recap for Anki and one for the books I read in Chinese this year, and then I’ll have to think about whether or not I want to start a reading challenge for 2026. The language competition is still on-going of course, so I’m not sure it’s wise to add extra prompts.

Happy December! ☃️

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.