I only learn languages to read books, play games, and more generally to consume media and entertainment. I’m not interested at all in communication and talking to people in general, so I’ve always felt a bit disconnected from the language learning community in general.
I’m not a social person, I don’t like meeting new people and making friends, I just like reading books, playing video games, and of course learning languages.
That’s why I started my first blog, insidethatjapanesebook.com in the first place; I wanted a personal blog where I could talk about learning Japanese to read books, and focus entirely on reading rather than speaking or listening. Then I got more and more interested in improving my Korean to also read books in Korean, and more recently, I started playing Genshin in Chinese, which made me want to learn the language, and of course, read mystery novels in Chinese. So I renamed my blog notes.inhae.blog to make it more a personal blog rather than a Japanese dedicated website.

I used to be on Twitter, and then on Mastodon, and now I’m on no social media at all.
Social media is just not for me at all, and I regret spending so much time and energy trying to fit in a system that was not for me. I did enjoy some aspects of social media (obviously, mostly the people I met there), but at the same time, social interactions just give me so much anxiety that I’ve never been happy on social media, it felt more like something I had to do.
I also always ended up posting more for others than for myself, and even though I met really great people that I loved, I never really found my place anywhere. So I always ended up posting content that I thought people would find interesting, and I kept refraining from posting the things that I really wanted to talk about because it felt awkward thinking it would land on people’s timeline.
As for my blog, even though I’ve been writing it for many years and absolutely love it, it had a huge problem: Wordpress. I just couldn’t stand this platform anymore, it keeps showing me adds to upgrade subscriptions, the plugin system feels so old and clunky, the editor is just a pain to use.
I’ve been wanting to quit Wordpress for a long time, but alternatives didn’t look better.
So I used Claude code to create this website, and I was able to do something that’s really me. I’m not limited in the tools I can use, and no one is pushing subscriptions to me.

This is just my personal reading and gaming journal, it’s very different from what I used to post on my older blog or Mastodon. There, I used to double or even triple check everything because I was afraid to say something wrong, I felt like people were expecting me to give reliable information.
But this website is mostly replacing my physical reading notebooks that I wrote for myself. So I don’t double-check anything, I don’t re-read myself and live fine with typos, mistakes and my broken English.
Romanisation might be wrong, it’s just there to make the site more readable, but I don’t really care if it’s uncorrect. Same for everything, vocabulary, character list, some pinyin, etc. it’s probably not reliable.