Introducing I+1Quest
I Turned the Best English-Learning Method of the AI Era into a Game
An endless-story RPG that intelligently matches your English level
I believe this article will completely change where your English stands and reshape how you understand language learning.
If you clicked in, you've come to the right place. We're the same kind of people—at the very least, neither of us enjoys test-oriented English, and we'd both rather learn a language in a way that's actually enjoyable—
Picture this: over the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, you get hooked on a game—an RPG adventure that keeps generating stories matched to your English level, with plots and characters you can customize. Carried along by the cheat-code thrill of leveling up in another world, you and your friends binge it for three days and three nights straight—and then you go ace your English exam.
—and right now, no tool on the market takes our need for fun in language learning seriously.
Plenty of people have grown up on the saying that only through hardship can you rise above others. But suffering doesn't make us improve; it just turns you into a masochist (jk
Without the reward of joy, sticking with anything long-term becomes a fight against human nature.
If learning could be fun, who wouldn't want that? Learning itself should be a joyful thing: humanity traveled from slash-and-burn prehistory all the way to the AI era on the strength of the pleasure-of-learning code written deep into our genes. If learning came with no pleasurable feedback, humankind would have gone extinct long ago.
So if learning has left you exhausted, bored, and itching to escape, that only means you haven't found the right method, haven't figured out what you actually want to learn—or your surroundings have drummed into you that you're simply not cut out for it.
From middle school to high school to college, we've spent 14 years on English, and the methodology has barely changed since we first met the language in primary school—memorize some words, recite texts, grind reading exercises, drill listening.
On top of that method, a hundred schools of thought have sprung up, each with its own fancy remixes trying to make vocabulary memorization itself a little more fun—but none of them escape the underlying logic of memorize, memorize, memorize, memorize, memorize.
The algorithm school: Baicizhan, Bu Bei Dan Ci, Maimemo, Shanbay.
The print-media school: English novels in the original, the newspapers your school subscribed to, marking words and taking notes.
The dictionary school: abandon. a-ban-don. abandon.
The memory school: roots and affixes, visual association, memory palaces.
I know plenty of ace learners have beaten the game with every one of these schools—and if that's you, genuine respect. But I'm an ordinary player. In high school I tried every single one—and couldn't stick with any of them for even two weeks.
If that's you too, please don't worry, because this isn't about lacking willpower. Quite the opposite: it's this vocabulary-and-grammar, memorization-reigns-supreme system of language learning that, in the AI era, should finally exit the stage of history.
I'm not going to drop the ultimate language-learning conclusion on you right now, slap in a download link, and call it a day—that wouldn't be responsible. My hope is that through our conversation here, a picture of what ideal language learning looks like forms naturally in your mind, and then you can experience firsthand my first attempt at a step toward that picture. Only by understanding the first principles behind language learning can we walk farther together down the road of compounding.
But before that, I want to explore a more important question with you—
How do humans actually learn a language?
What English Class Taught Us
Think back to your English classes.
The teacher spends 45 minutes at the podium explaining attributive clauses—in flawless Chinese—and you fill a full page of notes.
Next class, the teacher is back with grammar points and set collocations, again in flawless Chinese, and you fill another page.
During break, some hardworking classmate goes up to ask: “Teacher, teacher, why do we use that here instead of which?”
By the end of the semester you've filled several notebooks—and then a question like that shows up on the exam, and you can't answer it.
You diligently recite spellings, grammar points, set phrases, sentence patterns—thirty words every morning, fewer than five still in memory by night, and if one survives the week, that's already a win.
And when those words actually show up on a test, what pops into your head isn't the meaning but some bizarre sound-alike mnemonic scene you once invented: ambulance—ǎn bù néng sǐ, “I can't die.” Why can't you die? Oh—you're in an ambulance. So that's what it means.
nambulance, ān bù néng sǐ, “I can't die”—why can't I die? Oh, we're on the road, there's still time for a rescue—so it means ambulance. So this sentence must be about something happening to an ambulance. But given the theme of the passage, it can't have anything to do with an ambulance—rule out this option, pick B... n
And the people in your class who are truly good at English? They don't do any of this. They don't even attend English class.
In high school I asked the classmates scoring 140+ (out of 150) on English. What they had in common wasn't more practice problems or better notes—it was that before high school, they had built up a foundational stock of vocabulary through unconventional means and read large amounts of English material one way or another. Some grew up on English cartoons and American shows; some had well-off families who hired foreign tutors to study alongside them; some simply came out of international schools, soaked in English from day one.
Ask them how they learned, and all they'll say is “just read more, listen more, watch more.”
Is that statement correct? Completely correct.
Is it useful? A load of nothing.
Because you have no idea what to read or what to listen to. I've already memorized vocabulary until I wanted to puke, and now you want me to go hunt down outside reading material on my own?
You open an English novel: the first three pages are covered in vocabulary annotations, the remaining few hundred are pristine.
You open an English podcast: five minutes in, not a single word understood, and you quietly close it.
Even when you stumble onto something you can follow—say, Peppa Pig—it feels unbearably dull, and after a few minutes you'd rather scroll your phone.
You can't find input that fits you.
The I+1 Theory of Comprehensible Input
A story for you.
In 1974, a little Japanese girl came to New York with her family. Her neighbor happened to be a linguistics professor.
The professor wanted to teach her English. He picked up a ball and said, “This is a ball. Say ‘ball’ with me.” The girl said nothing.
He tried again: “Come on, say ‘ball’ with me, or you can't play with it.” Still silence.
Week one: not a single word. Week two: not a single word. The first month, the second month, the girl stayed silent.
The professor gave up on teaching her words and simply let her listen, day after day, to the English conversations around her.
Five months later, the girl suddenly started to speak. And from the moment she did, her spoken English quickly caught up with American kids her age.
That professor was the great Stephen Krashen. After studying this case again and again, he put forward a theory that shook the field of linguistics—the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis.
The core idea fits in one sentence:
When we understand the foreign-language messages we receive, language acquisition happens automatically, beneath conscious awareness.
Not memorizing word lists and grammar points. Not parsing sentence structure. Not grinding cloze tests. It's understanding what you hear and understanding what you read.
When you grasp the meaning of a foreign-language passage through context, situation, and imagery, your brain quietly builds long-term memory of vocabulary, grammar, and sentence patterns. The process is automatic, unconscious, and inevitable.
He also gave us a key concept: i+1.
“i” is your current level. “+1” is just a bit beyond it.
Material that's too hard—wall-to-wall unknown words and grammar—becomes noise, and the brain blocks the input entirely.
Material that's too easy has nothing new, and the brain has no room to grow.
Material that's just a notch harder—you understand most of it, and the occasional unknown word can be guessed from context—is the state where acquisition is most efficient. The words you guess are exactly where your language grows.
The best English student in your class, while you're tearing your hair out over a cloze test, always lands on the right answer in one read. Ask how, and they say, “It's just a feel for the language.”
They're not being coy. They genuinely can't explain it.
Because most of language ability is tacit knowledge—you can use it, but you can't say where it came from.
Krashen's research team later tracked many similar cases:
An Indonesian young man who never studied grammar and never took a single English class became fluent purely from watching YouTube videos—and was writing reams of rap in English by age ten.
A Korean woman started from second-grade-level English readers, read 66 books in a year, and leapt forward in English—while barely noticing she was “studying English” at all.
These cases point to one conclusion: the prerequisite for fluent language use isn't grammar knowledge—it's massive amounts of comprehensible input.
But Here's the Problem—Where Do You Find “Just Right” Material?
The theory is beautiful; reality is stubborn.
What materials do we normally have access to?
Comprehensible but unbearably boring: English textbooks.
Fun but utterly incomprehensible: American TV shows, English movies, English podcasts.
Boring and incomprehensible: English test papers.
The researchers themselves admit it: for the vast majority of learners, finding comprehensible input that is both interesting and pitched at exactly your level is the hardest problem of all.
Traditional publishing can't solve it, because once a book is printed, its difficulty and its story are frozen. It can't suit readers of different levels at once, and it can't satisfy the wildly different story tastes of players.
But what if the content wasn't printed—what if it were generated in real time?
So I Built This Thing
I'm Lai Jiacheng, the one behind the Snowball Diary—a college freshman with zero programming background.
But I had one idea: use AI to generate an English story that never ends, always matches your level, and is always fun.
You set up a story you care about—a medieval adventure of swords and sorcery, a cyberpunk world, a campus rom-com, a post-apocalyptic survival quest—and the AI generates an English story for you, calibrated to your English level.
You read the story. When you hit a word you don't know and can't guess, one tap shows the meaning.
Then you make a choice—hide and slip away, or negotiate and team up? Trust this NPC, or draw your sword? Based on your choice, the AI generates what happens next.
This is not a fixed book. It's a story that never stops growing.
And I added one crucial feature: custom word lists.
I know some of you study with sharp goals. You can import the words your teacher covered in class today, CET-4/CET-6 syllabus vocab, high-frequency CET-6 words, core IELTS words, vocabulary from past TOEFL papers—any list you want to master. As it writes the story, the AI weaves the words you need into the plot, naturally and over and over.
You don't need to memorize words. You just read stories. The words will keep reappearing across different stories and save files, until you've absorbed them without trying.
It's exactly how you learned Chinese as a kid—you never memorized the definition of “apple,” but you ate apples countless times and heard the word countless times, and it simply stuck.
I also added text-to-speech. You can tap through sentence by sentence, or play the whole story through. Watch and listen at the same time—train your ear.
The entire product is designed around one principle: make you forget you're learning English.
When you're lost in a great story, caring more about the protagonist's fate than about any single word's meaning—that is precisely when your brain is acquiring language at top speed, in the most efficient way there is.
How Far Along Is It?
Honestly, as a student who also has finals to prepare for, the current version is just a demo. The interface is bare-bones, and plenty is still rough around the edges.
But the core features are already working:
Story consistency system—the AI remembers every choice you've made, keeping the story coherent. You will never see “you saved someone yesterday, and three days later that person has vanished from the story.”
Foreshadowing and chain reactions—a choice you make now may not show its consequences until a dozen, even dozens of scenes later. Like a real RPG: there are setups, and there are payoffs.
Story rewind—read too fast and lost the thread? In the recap view, flip back anytime, like paging through a novel, to retrace what happened.
Custom word lists + contextual repetition—import the words you want to learn, and the AI works them into the story naturally, again and again.
Text-to-speech—tap through sentence by sentence or listen to the whole thing; read along and train your ear.
Story submissions & sharing—export the stories you create and share them with me, and import stories others have shared. Down the line I'll set up a server and a community platform so everyone can share and swap stories online directly.
And next, I'll keep iterating:
A ground-up rebuild of the story engine—richer ways and angles of interaction, beyond plain text choices, for a stronger sense of participation.
Going multimodal—adding visuals and sound effects, taking stories from pure text to a genuinely immersive experience.
Setting up the server—I'll complete the ICP filing and stand up a server over the summer. After that you won't need to configure your own API keys; it'll work the moment you open it.
Zero-to-one dev tutorials—I'll start a series documenting how a college freshman who couldn't code at all used AI tools to turn this idea into reality.
In Closing
I'm just an ordinary college freshman—ordinary finances, no international school background, no childhood of reading English novels, no language talent to speak of.
My English learning looked just like most people's: memorizing vocabulary to the point of nausea, failing to make sense of practice drills, test scores stuck in place.
Until I encountered comprehensible input theory and started building a game of my own, learning English by “reading for pure fun”—apocalyptic survival, rebirth-and-system stories, rules horror, hard sci-fi, cultivation-world weirdness. I found content I genuinely cared about, and I read and listened—a lot.
I never deliberately prepped for exams, never memorized word lists. Yet my reading ability genuinely improved without my noticing.
I didn't get smarter. I just found the right method—the right way to open the door to language learning. I'm a lucky person.
If you've struggled with English for years, if you've tried countless methods and none of them worked, I want to tell you:
The problem was never you. It was the method.
Traditional English education trains you to believe: memorize the words first, then the grammar, and one day you'll open your mouth and speak fluent English.
But decades of language research tell us: that road almost never works.
The road that works: find content you love, read a lot, listen a lot, and let the language grow naturally through comprehensible input.
Input first; grammar as backup.
The only thing that can carry you all the way to the finish line is not willpower—it's love of the content itself.
What you love is your life.
The demo will stay free to download. If this interests you, follow me—I'll keep posting the latest progress on the product.
In this AI era, a person with an idea shouldn't be stopped by technical barriers.
You have a chance too, just like me.
All it takes is the right direction and a brave start.
The theoretical content of this article draws on the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis and a video series by Luo Xiaoni (罗肖尼), a creator on Bilibili. If you're curious, I highly recommend watching the original videos for the fuller theory.