Some useful I found recently for reading cnovels, that work as Readers that provide translations, or Parallel Texts:
zhenhunxiaoshuo.com - A chinese site. has a ton of priest novels, a lot of other danmei novels as well including modaozushi, sleuth of ming dynasty, love is more than a word, etc. I adore this site. I found it by chance when someone recommended it for reading the sleuth of ming dynasty. I deeply appreciate whoever made this site. This site is visually simple and easy to look at, and if you know the titles of the novels you want to read then it is exceptionally easy to locate the correct one. (In addition, if you like any of these novels, please consider buying a copy of the official novels either on the sites they were initially sold on like jjwxc, or their print editions - this is a link to jjwxc, Priestâs Guardian page. jjwxc also has MXTXâs works on it, Meatbunâs 2ha on it, etc).Â
This is a google doc guide by @anonflail on twitter about how to make an account on jjwxc and purchase the official novels: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ikGyfFiI4SQe2NmrNsJ3sgV71Iv6e5tGqN9i8SZbuSA/edit . If you happen to be reading any cnovel translations, most translationâs include a link in their intro page to the original official cnovel.
In addition, sometimes if the novels are published you can find print copies of them on YesAsia.com. If you find it this way, often they are traditional character book versions so check in the description. Also look up books by chinese title or pinyin, if the english title does not give you results. I got the mo dao zu shi books from this site, and The Untamed Drama OST. You can also find print novels on amazon, ebay, and aliexpress. Forewarning though I really... have no idea if the ones on these sites are official published copies or not. I got Zhen Hun off Aliexpress months ago, having no idea about anywhere else to find it at the time. The book is in simplified characters, and contains most of the novel but I think is missing all of the extra chapters, and my version has an intro featuring Kunlun that doesnât exist in the jjwxc online version. Again, if you buy a book, check if the characters are traditional or simplified before purchasing. Be aware that often cnovels are more than 1 volume - donât buy 1 and think you have the entire novel, actually check how many volumes it is... (Like Mo Du by Priest is 3 volumes?) Iâve found YesAsia to have the most genuine looking books...
Also, if Iâm going to get nitpicky... if you want to guarantee you are reading a version of the cnovel with all the extra chapters - the official release is your only guarantee. I personally like to have some notepad copies of the txt to edit and look at, and often unofficial txt downloads will be missing chapters, be the older unedited and therefore less finished versions of chapters, and will be missing later chapters and sections. So if you really enjoy a story, you might as well enjoy the full thing by supporting the author, and getting their most complete official versions of the novels.Â
daomubiji.org - If youâre a fan of The Lost Tomb series (the books or the multitude of dramas), this website seems to have most or all of the novels. Its absolutely huge. Like the last site mentioned, you can read them on here. If youâve never read daomubiji, hereâs a quick intro: its real well known sort of like Harry Potter. Itâs very Lara Croft/Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones/Uncharted/The Mummy kind of stuff - with the fantasy elements being generally similar to other chinese-tomb-raider genre stories. So think adventurous tomb exploring plus some horror fantasy. It has a ton of drama adaptations you could check out if you wanted a visual introduction to daomubiji - some adaptations are better or worse than others. A fun fact - the two male main leads are probably the biggest ship/CP in the fandom, as far as I can tell. Despite them not being explicitly canonically romantic - compared to the danmei novels listed on the site above lol. I think its a tragedy tbh... that it is so hard to find daomubji fanfictions in english, given how huge this novel series is and how many adaptations it has, and how huge the chinese fandom is. There are some chinese fics on ao3, but I know there are some epic length well written fanfics for this series somewhere in the chinese internet. (Edit: here is the ao3 daomubiji tag). I just canât find them lol ToT. Also there are tragically FEW english fanfics for daomubiji, despite how accessible the story is for english speakers (the first 6 novels already have official english translated books, and most of the drama adaptations have easily accessible english subs). If you know what chinese sites I can read daomubiji fanfic on, please let me know! I know some fanfics for this fandom are so HUGE, and well known, they have txt files floating around and are 100+ chapters and were once-upon-a-time recced on baidu (but the links are broken now :c ). Anyway, back to this site. You can use a dictionary/translator to lookup unknown words, use the free Zhongwen chrome extension to hover over words for a definition, or view this site in the Pleco WebReader/Chinese Zero to Hero reader/Idiom app, and click words for definitions as needed. Again, if you like any of the daomubiji novels, the authorâs written a ton! Go support them! The Lost Tomb is actually published in english too up to volume 6, under the name The Grave Robberâs Chronicles (if you wanted a print english copy).
mtlnovel.com - useful in general as a way to read novels roughly-translated into english, if no existing translation is already being done. Itâs also useful if, for example, the english translation you are reading is unfinished but youâre desperate to read more even if itâs machine translated lol. It has a large number of cnovels on the site. I feel this siteâs coolest feature though, is the ability to enable âRAW.â If you do that, at the top of the chapter youâre reading, then you will see the traditional character paragraphs above the english machine translated ones. This allows you to use any novel on the site as a parallel chinese-english reader. Right now you can only enable RAW if you are logged in. An account is free. If you run into unknown chinese words, you can look them up in the dictionary/translator of your choice. Or, if you have the free Zhongwen chrome extension, then you can just hover over unknown words for a definition on the same page. (If you like any of these novels, support the authorâs official releases).Â
https://dictionary.chinesezerotohero.com/#/reader - Iâve seen the site Chinese Zero to Hero before and its quite helpful. I think thereâs paid areas, but this area is free. In the Reader, you can paste in any chinese text and it will provide pinyin above the hanzi, along with dictionary definitions if you hover over a word/phrase. Iâm testing it right now, and their translations are pretty good! (This Chinese Zero to Hero Reader, or LanguageTools.io are free alternatives I would suggest instead of LingQ, for a reader). In addition, this site also has a lot of free graded readers with all these same features plus accompanying audio. I read The Monkey King on this site before. This site in general also has a large selection of grammar points, and a nice dictionary that breaks down words/characters by radical, includes links to related words, includes pictures of the wordâs meaning (in case youâre a visual learner or are making flashcards), includes mnemonics (which I just realized!) and example sentences. It looks very useful and I should start using their dictionary more... (mnemonics seems to be the big benefit of this that Pleco doesnât have).Â













