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myhanfuinspiration · 1 year

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My biggest tips if you're learning Chinese and starting to read Chinese webnovels (this list is not all inclusive, I'm sure there's things I forgot to mention):

Download Pleco app and use the free Clipboard Reader to copy/paste in text to read (or purchase the Pleco Reader tool which is what I did). Pleco has click translations (and great dictionaries), a Dictate Text text to speech button (good for listening to pronunciation while reading), a Google translate whole-section button (good for if you understand individual words but not the overall sentences/paragraphs), and it's just very Reader friendly. Pleco also has many graded readers to purchase if you'd like to first read 100, 300, 500, 1000, 1500, 2000 unique character graded readers Before trying webnovels. Alternatively: download the app Readibu. You can open webnovel url links in Readibu, and the app has click translations and can give you pronunciation of individual words. The app also has a Statistics button that tells you what percentage of words in a given chapter is in what HSK level. This can help you determine if a novel is your reading level. For example if you are reading level HSK 4, and open a novel with 90% words in HSK 4 or below? Good choice to read. If you open a novel and rhe app says it's 80% words HSK 4, 15% HSK 5, 3% HSK 6 and the rest above HSK? Then that novel may be a more difficult reading choice. Readibu lets you explore their app to find some webnovels, but you can also simply paste in a url of any novels you've found online. The paid version of readibu has additional tools like full-sentence machine translation.

Google/search the following terms when looking for novels: the Chinese version of the novel name, and xiaoshuozaixian 小说在线. So for example to find Guardian by priest, I might go to novelupdates.com Guardian page and find the Chinese name listed there for it Zhen hun 镇魂. Then I would go to google/duckduckgo/searx.space and search "镇魂小说在线" I may also include the author name "priest" if needed. One of the first results is likely to be jjwxc site where priest published it. There should also be additional results, if you're looking for say a chapter that got locked on its original publishing site etc or need a site that is more compatible with whatever Reader app you're using (Pleco, Readibu, other). Qidian and Jjwxc are major webnovel sites.

For that matter, do you want to listen to the audiobook as you read? Go to a search site again like Google, and type the book name in chinese along with 有声读物 youshengduwu or 有声在线 yousheng zaixian or 有声书 youshengshu. You could also search using those terms in youtube or bilibili. Ximalaya and Himalaya apps also have a lot of audiobooks, but I've noticed this year a lot of region blocks on stuff in ximalaya. So I usually listen to audiobooks on bilibili.com now.

If you are reasonably comfortable in your Chinese reading skills and are able to understand what you read even if word-translations are only right 80% of the time? Then you can expand what applications you read in. ANY ebook Reader app is likely to have click-translate features, you may need to download additional language dictionaries (Kindle app requires this) or you may just need Google Translate/DeepL/some translation app installed on your phone. Then you can open up any Reader app of your choice (I like Moon+ Reader personally) and you'll have click translate, sentence machine translate (using the translation app installed), and Text To Speech for the passages. The translation quality is likely to be worse than Pleco and Readibu, and will probably be roughly as good as Google Translate quality. But it is usable if you are upper beginner or above and know enough to recognize when a translation looks suspiciously wrong. Idiom app also has this level of translation quality (free), and Lingq has this translation quality for chinese (I don't use lingq because it's a paid subscription but the Chinese word translation quality is as poor as Google translate so I'd just rather use free tools that use Google translate at that point). You can also simply read IN your web browser in Chrome, Firefox, or Edge. In all of those, if you have Google Translate/DeepL/any translation app installed, then you can hold down and click words for the option to click translate. You can also highlight whole sections of text to machine translate the sections. Microsoft Edge actually has one positive in this regard: Edge has the feature Read Aloud that uses text to speech to read a web page. And Edge's text to speech sounds WAY better than any other tts service I've used. In addition, if you read using Edge on the computer, their Read Aloud TTS has multiple voice options on computer version of Microsoft Edge and in Microsoft Word. If you plan to heavily utilize TTS tools, I think Edge's tts sounds the best by far.

If you would really like to study with a parallel text translation? I recommend the app I'm currently using daily: Parallel translations of books by Kursx. It is free. It has click translation, TTS for individual words and per sentence, it has parallel translation per sentence (resulting in some of the most easy to read machine translations I've seen, and it helps if you know individual words but can't parse the grammar). It has a unique word count statistics for the book, as well as total word count, list of words by frequency (if you want to pre study vocabulary), percentage of book read, estimate of time remaining to read (I love seeing this number go down), how often you're looking up words (useful to notice if a book is more or less difficult for you). You can import txt or epub files to read. I personally suggest looking up novel names in chinese plus 小说 xiaoshuo (novel) plus "txt" to find text downloads, or copy pasting text from a website into a txt file to then read in this app. Or go to a site with epub downloads and search for the book you wish to read. The parallel text translation and Dictate Text tts functions are my favorite parts about this app. But the statistics page for the books I also find highly motivating.

A tip about reading: when reading any machine translations to help you, be aware of the following common mtl mistakes. First, mtl may struggle to notice if a Chinese name/place is a name or an item. Examples would be Li Lianhua potentially being translated by a mtl as Li Lotus, instead of the mtl recognizing it as a name and leaving it as Li Lianhua. Mtl are likely to struggle a lot with names and sometimes switching them to object/verb word translations so it may be a good idea to read after checking the names of people in the novel, or if you see a word translated weird then be mindful it might actually be someone's name. (Guo Changcheng's name often gets translated to Guo Great Wall by mtl). Second, mtl often mixes up gender of pronouns 他她它. Please go into Chinese reading already aware of which ta is he, she, or it. So that when you run into this mtl error, you can check for yourself which pronoun the ta was meant to be. Third is also pronoun related: English sometimes needs a pronoun in a sentence when Chinese does not. In those cases, mtl will often just make up one and use he/she/it/you/me/they when no word is present in the Chinese. In some cases this is fine and the meaning is the same. In other cases it wildly changes the meaning of the sentence. In these cases, look to the previous Chinese sentence to determine what noun the following sentence is about. Then you can determine which noun would have Actually been used in a correct English translation. Then you will know if the mtl translation is right or wrong. Fourth, like the last issue mentioned, mtl will struggle with sentences in chinese that require less words than the English equivalent. In any cases like this, be aware the mtl will add English words without those necessarily have anything to do with the actual meaning of the sentence. It may change the sentence meaning significantly. In these cases also, it's good to look at the last few sentences and then determine the most likely meaning of the current sentence, to judge if the mtl is roughly correct or Very Wrong. Fifth thing to be aware of: some machine translation tools will simplify translations. By this I mean they will turn long imagery lines or idioms into shorter single words sometimes. It greatly depends on which mtl you use, and if the mtl is trying to preserve detail (which would mean preserving the long line of imagery) or sacrificing detail for a more roughly correct translation. By this I mean that it's easy for an mtl to mess up a line as complicated as "He was stiff as a coffin" with so many words to incorrectly translate and implications, so some mtl will change to "He was stiff" and leave out some words. When I used to use Baidu translate it had a habit of doing this a LOT. Where if I looked up each word/phrase individually I would get a lot of detail, but if I put in a whole paragraph then many lines like chengyu and imagery of "hairs standing up from head to tail" would translate to MUCH shorter one word or short phrases like "scared" and so much detail was lost. Google translate and DeepL ALSO seem to do some deletion of details with longer passages. I have been using the KursX app for machine translation lately because since it translates each sentence individually, it tends to preserve most details. Whereas I've seen many mtl tools start deleting or summarizing details if you put a longer passage into them. So if you use any machine translation for phrases, sentences, or paragraphs, and you notice words you individually translated are NO longer in the machine translated output? It's possible the mtl is deleting details or summarizing details. If this is the case, a way to find the original details again is to either shorten the input into the mtl (to very short phrases bit by bit in the sentence), or by looking up each individual word in a sentence.

Bilibili Comics app is great if you like reading manhua. You can read comics in Chinese (just click the Chinese language option), and then go read the English translations if you need clarification of something. The app gives you icon dress up rewards for reading, which kind of let's you gamify your studying into fun little decorative rewards if you push yourself to keep reading.

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myhanfuinspiration · 1 year

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