if u dont mind sharing, how do u recommend learning chinese? (since i think knowing the endgoal might help: it is more to read c-novels than to communicate in chinese, though reading itself can theoretically to the latter lol)
I can't really pretend to be an expert on how to learn; I really only know what has been working for me. However I am.... both autistic and unemployed/riding on savings, so what's worked for me to get to where I am has depended on having both a lot of free time and an obsessive ability to focus on a single project for very long periods of time.
Anyway, I started simply, just through a mobile language learning app (I used lingodeer which had been recommended to me, but it costs money and I'm sure duolingo works fine too). Eight months later, I got pretty much through what the app considered to be HSK 3-4 (I doubt that would actually count as HSK 3-4 though) when I spontaneously started a private translation project.
I think translation is a better tool for learning than just trying to passively read the source text, especially in the beginning, partially because it is a lot of work figuring out the meanings of sentences from the definitions of words and some grammar skills, and translation gives you something to show for it at the end--it's a motivating factor. In addition, when you get invested in the translation, you dig a little further, and end up learning more that way.
When I started, I had first run all the characters through yabla's chinese-english dictionary so that I got a 'pre-digested' rundown of words (in that yabla decided on how to break down the string of characters into words/chengyu). However, I think doing it that way ended up making it so I didn't pick up words quite as fast, because I was focusing more on the definitions of the words than the Chinese characters themselves.
To more effectively use translation as a tool for learning, I'd highly recommend going straight from the source text and using the zhongwen extension (works both on chrome and firefox) to highlight characters to see their definition. This method has the benefits of 1) allowing you to see the characters as they are in the sentence, and 2) forcing you to choose whether to look up a word or not, rather than just automatically translating every word.
(In fact, after finishing a first draft of my first translation project, I went back and retranslated/edited the parts I'd done with the 'yabla method' using the 'zhongwen extension method' so it'd all be at the same level of quality)
Another tip I'd recommend for retaining vocabulary is to sound things out to yourself. It’s much easier to remember which characters are which if you remember how they’re pronounced, and eventually you can start to suss out the differences between characters that look the same (“right, that’s 睁 - zhēng, with the eye radical, means to open one’s eyes. and that’s 静 - jìng, with radical 青 (that green/blue/black word), means calm”). The zhongwen extension also gives you characters' pinyin and tones (and given that you've already gotten far enough learning through an app, you ought to be able to know how to pronounce characters correctly given pinyin with tones). The policy I've begun having is to sound out all lines of narration in my head, and sound out all lines of dialogue out loud.
I hadn't really started sounding things out on a regular basis until my current translation project, cuz it really does take a lot of time in the beginning when you hardly know any of the characters in an average line. But it really does make you improve a lot faster, I think. But, if you think it's a drag in the beginning, you could maybe just sound out dialogue, or particularly important lines.
So, the timeline for me was basically, April 2020 I started learning Mandarin through an app. December 2020 I started my first translation project, and I could probably read about 20% of characters in an average line. I finished that project in October 2021, at which point I could probably understand about 70% of characters in an average line. Then in January 2022 I started my current translation project, and by now (about a month away from finishing that project) I can probably understand about 95% of characters in an average line--which is now enough to read the raws at a reasonable pace, just occasionally hovering the zhongwen extension over a word I don't know.
