Inhae's blog

Second recap of 2025 has to be about Anki, the tool that allowed me to learn Japanese and now Chinese. My Chinese study is closely related to Genshin Impact, and so is Anki too. All my cards come from the Archon Quest, story quests and events.

There have been ups and downs, and my relation to Anki has changed a lot when I broke my streak. When I still had that beautiful streak going at the beginning of the year, missing a day would have been the end of the world, I remember that one or two times I realised that I hadn’t studied Anki just as I was falling asleep in bed. And yes, I immediately got up, and studied my cards at midnight. Now obviously, missing a day is not a big deal at all. I’m happy with my reviewing days even though it’s far from perfect. (I still haven’t studied my cards today lol, good thing I’m not doing anything for Christmas Eve.)

What I’m not happy about is the amount of new cards that I have added this year.

I have added 1440 cards in the last year, which is an average of 4 cards a day, when I have a limit of 10 new cards per day. I’m thinking of the amount of vocabulary I would know by now if I had added enough cards to hit my quota of new cards every day and yeah… I’m not happy about that. Most of my reviews where just reviewing older cards without learning anything new. But it’s too late now, all I can do is promise myself that I’ll do better next year.

The peak at the beginning of the graph is most certainly me adding the whole Lantern Rite story to Anki lol.

And my retention rate did increase compared to what it was one year ago! (I should have taken the screenshot a day when I did study Anki 🤣).

As for the cards themselves, they haven’t changed much recently, they’re still the same layout: a sentence with new words highlighted and displayed in a table. Answer shows the pronunciation and meaning. The sentence is read with TTS, and a new feature I did add recently is to choose randomly among a selection of voices. I’m using the Azure voices, they are so great!

So a typical card looks like this (read with zh-CN-YunxiNeural)

And this is an example read with zh-CN-XiaozhenNeural:

I have Aino to cheer me up during my review, and I always choose the colours to match the character’s palette. I sometimes change the characters depending on who I like the most at the moment (I mean, I always love Xiao the most, but we’re in Nod-Krai, so it’s more fun to choose Nod-Krai characters).

Leech cards have Jahoda. This is also how the “back” is displayed. The otter icon is to replay the audio.

I also have cards for words like dishes, weapons, local specialties, etc., combat voice lines (in this case, I add the chibi character corresponding to the voice line like Ineffa in this example), as well as special cards for NPC names that do not display the meaning.

And I have been playing with TTS styles lately. Generally speaking, I find the TTS fine as it is, but some sentences do express strong feelings like anger or fear (they all come from dialogues after all), and so I’ve added a field so that I can specify a tone if needed.

So here’s an example of a sentence without specified style:

And the same sentence with the “angry” tone:

I love my Anki cards more than I could say. It’s the only tool I use to learn Chinese, and this deck is the most customised I ever made. I know it’s recommended to keep the cards simple and all, but it never worked for me. The JLPT deck was a card = a word, and it was a nightmare. I like the sentences, I like that the words are in context, and I like Genshin story so it’s cool to be able to link a sentence to a story when I study them. And yes if I get one word wrong, it means the whole card is considered as “wrong” even though the other words were right, but I realised that it doesn’t matter at all.

So I probably won’t change the layout of my cards, but I do update them regularly, either by changing the chibi characters and colours, either by upgrading things, like the randomised TTS and the tone styles.

100% of my cards are from Genshin Impact, and I don’t think it will change. It does cover a much larger vocabulary that I expected for a fantasy game, and thanks to it, I’m now able to read novels in Chinese, which will be the topic of my next post and my last recap for 2025!

Happy Holidays! 🎄☃️

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.