Inhae's blog

Some things I’ve been doing lately~

Listening to audiobooks in Mandarin!

I’ve been using Weixin Dushu since the beginning of 2026, but it’s only recently that I tried their audiobooks. I will probably write a blog post about weixin dushu, because it’s insanely good for language learning.

I listened to two audiobooks, both are Chinese translations of Japanese novels. The first one is 怪屋谜案, the translation of 変な家 by Uketsu (which I read in Japanese), and the second one is 黎明之街, the translation of 夜明けの街で by Keigo Higashino, which I haven’t read.

I was really unsure of my level of listening in Mandarin, so I first chose a book I already read… and 怪屋谜案 was so easy to listen to, I had the feeling that I was understanding everything!! 😄 I remember that 変な家 was really easy to read in Japanese too, so it was definitely a good choice for a first audiobook!

For my second audiobook, I chose a book I haven’t read, but still stayed in known territory. I know that Keigo Higashino is an author who is very easy to read, so I chose a book that I wasn’t interested in reading in Japanese.

It turns out that 夜明けの街で is the perfect choice! I am not a fan of the story at all, it’s mainly about a man having an extramarital affair, so I don’t find it particularly enticing, and I might be proven wrong, but the end feels very obvious too. But, because the story is very focused on everyday life, it is very easy to understand. I can follow it without any problem.

Both audiobooks are full cast narrations, and the main narrator of 黎明之街 is 郝祥海 (Hao Xianghai), Genshin Varka’s VA!

My goal in learning languages has always been reading only, but I wouldn’t mind improving my listening skills a bit, especially in Mandarin, because it would allow me to play Genshin story without constantly looking at the text. For now, I always read what’s in the text box while listening, but maybe one day I’ll trust myself to just follow the story without clinging on to subtitles.

Where Winds Meet

I finished chapter 1 of Where Winds Meet main story, and it broke my heart… 😭 But I love this game so much! And it’s so difficult to play in Chinese, it’s such a struggle. I’m not able to understand everything, and sometimes I’m even completely lost, and I know it takes away a lot of the joy I could have playing this game, but I’m not giving up! I know that some time, at some point, it will get easier. 💪

So even though I did not understand everything, I found the main story extremely suspenseful! (To be honest, some chapters of the last Archon Quest felt so so long, with mostly people talking for hours and not much gameplay… so compared to that, WWM’s main story has been an exciting experience). Now I can’t wait to continue, but I also want to really take the time to explore the regions I have unlocked. I’m so slow in everything, my exploration is not making any progress. To give me some guideline, I’m making exploration goals for each region (I only did Blissful Retreat so far, but I plan on doing it for other regions as well):

Currently inked

And now is a good time to talk about the inks I chose for the month (thought they’ll certainly last half of the year!).

They’re both from Dominant Industry:

The Polar Star is a beautiful dark grey, and Autumn Forest is a light green with a pronounced pink glitter.

I only rarely use green ink, but Autumn Forest is breathtaking 💚.

Reading slump?

Since I finished the wuxia novel 流星蝴蝶剑 by Gu Long, I’ve felt very unmotivated by my current reads. I was so emotionally involved in 流星蝴蝶剑, and the characters were so fascinating, that everything seems fade and boring after that… Even books I would normally have loved don’t manage to spark any interest in me. My current read in Chinese is FIX 2 by 臥斧, and I loved the first one, FIX, so I thought I would love the second one as well, but I have a hard time getting into it. I read and liked the first short story, but I can’t find any motivation to start the second one.

It’s worse with my current Japanese novel, a crime novel about giving justice to victims of crimes who cannot find peace in the afterworld as long as justice has not be done. The plot is great, and it’s the kind of story I would normally enjoy, but I have a hard time feeling involved 😩.

I’m placing all my hopes in my next book in Korean. I’ve been wanting to read it since it came out, but I had to finish my physical TBR first. Hopefully this one will be good enough to help me out of my current reading slump:

I really enjoyed writing this blog post, I should do it more often! I thought that most of the content in this kind of posts would be redundant with what I post on Mastodon, so that’s why I’m not usually writing this kind of updates here. But at the same time, I think that most of the people who read this blog are not on Mastodon and vice-versa, so it’s still worth it? I’ll try to avoid repeating the same content or posting the same pictures, but yeah, I plan on writing this kind of blog posts more often, maybe at least once a month.

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.