Inhae's blog

Just some highlights of February!

Lantern Rite

It was Lantern Rite in Genshin, always my favourite event of the year and the one I am the most motivated to study in terms of vocabulary.

I would say that Lantern Rite is also one of the most challenging content in terms of language level. There is specialised vocabulary (like last year was funeral-related stuff, and this year we had some talks about antique reliques and jade objects) and there are characters like Zhongli or the adepti who use a very refined and sophisticated language level with a lot of four-character expressions and structures that feel very classical. This year, the new character Zibai’s way of talking was also a bit of a challenge to me.

Thankfully, Paimon is here to reformulate or simplify anytime there’s something difficult. So she follows this tirade with: 哇！第一站就是吃吗？

Or there’s this one, that seemed hard at first, but upon re-reading it, I realised that I actually understand it quite well.

It’s still hard though, and I still haven’t completely studied the event (I’m missing day 4). But eh, Lantern Rite is also the moment of the year where we see Xiao, the reason why I started learning Chinese in the first place, so it always gives me a boost in motivation.

My setup for adding new words to Anki hasn’t changed, I’m still copy-pasting the text from the Chinese Wiki to the Pleco reader, and then I go over every line and add the sentences that contain unknown words to Anki. All of this while replaying the event on BiliBili.

I’m also playing through the Illuga World Quest, and I will add the vocabulary from this quest to Anki as well. I’m much more motivated to learn vocab if it comes from quests or characters that I love.

Korean film journal

Something I still haven’t talked about on this blog (but I mentioned it on Mastodon) is my resolution to watch more Korean movies this year. I don’t usually watch k-dramas because they tend to be so long, and I don’t have the patience to sit through many episodes. I generally like series that are under 10 episodes in length. But Korea has a lot of great thrillers and crime movies, so this will be one of my focus for 2026.

I started a Korean movie journal with one page per film. I just write down some information about the movie, the main cast, a rating for me and my husband as well as a summary and some thoughts (I blurred the images because they contain spoilers).

It’s funny because I’m still trying out different layouts for my reading journals, and I’m still not satisfied, but I found the perfect layout for my Korean film journal right away.

The main text on the right is the summary of the film, and the text on the left are some unstructured thoughts about what I liked and disliked. The printed mini posters appear very dark on the pictures, but they actually look very good!

I watched 7 films so far, all crime thrillers:

• 스트리밍 Streaming: I loved it! But then Kang Haneul makes any film really great, doesn’t he?
• 널 기다리며 Missing you: I didn’t like it at all for several reasons. CW: sexual violence.
• 타겟 Don’t buy the Seller: I liked it, it was much better than I anticipated.
• 진범 The Culprit: I absolutely loved it, such a great plot. As a fan of whodunnit, this film was a pure delight.
• 내일의 기억 Recalled: it was okay, some things I liked, some things I disliked.
• 화차 Helpless: loved it! Great acting and great story, adapted from 火車 by Miyuki Miyabe.
• 침입자 Intruder: it was okay, very similar feeling to 내일의 기억.

New Reading tracker!

Last but not least, my new reading tracker is finally done!

I’ve been working on creating a new reading tracker that could be integrated to my blog. The main motivation was to stop using Notion because it’s too restricted for what I want to do. It might still need some polishing, and I will probably add more tabs in the future, but it’s already much better than what I could display with Notion. And clicking on the book covers in the “books” tab link to the associated mini review posted on my blog (only for books finished in 2026, and given that I publish my reviews at the end of each month, the links won’t work straight away. Books finished in February will link to their book review only once I publish the blog post on the last day of the month).

There are also interesting graphs that I didn’t have in Notion, like for example this graph that shows the number of books finished per month against the number of pages. Even though I finished 5 books in January and only 4 in February, the number of pages read is very similar!

So it’s now official, I won’t be updating Notion anymore. The new reading log is accessible through my blog’s menu.

And that’s it for now, but I’ll update very soon for my readings of February.

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.