So I found a somewhat interesting Chinese novel but it is barely translated, and so was thinking of trying to read the raws. However, I am practically illiterate past year one texts (and maybe not even that), so I would need to use translate to help me with every other sentence. Is there any tips or stuff to help improve my ability to read Chinese in a short amount of time? (Assuming I can speak it fluently to an extent)
Not really. I guess the only thing you can do is sacrifice your brain cells and try to use google translate.
Yeah I use Google translate and if there is already some of the book translated it helps so you can refer to it when reading the raws. You can I guess take sentences out and Google them separately to find more accurate translations but to be honest most of the time with GT you can understand the general gist of what's happening. Just try not to read really strange novels such as fantasy or wuxia as GT is terrible at translating them well Tbh if you want to translate it really well you can start to learn some basic Chinese to help but learning a language is hard haha I use Duolingo literally just to gain entry level knowledge
If you can already speak it that means you already understand what the words and sentences mean but you just don’t know the characters? You can try converting them into pinyin or using a text to speech function. The pinyin method usually works for me when I don’t know a character since I’ll end up knowing what it is when spoken.
I know how to speak Chinese, I just procrastinated away more than a decade of reading lessons so I’m basically illiterate. Hahaha
Google translate has the function to read out the text in the local language, assuming you can speak but can't read mandarin, just listen to the audio.
If you can speak and understand chinese you could try using a text to speech program. I used one for Vietnamese, at first its kind of jarring and robotic but after awhile you kind of get use to it.
Google translate is your only friend in this case. You can program a small macro or whatever to automatically translate the names, that might help a bit.