I forgot to mention it on the last post! This is kind of a niche study activity idea, but I did it a lot the first year I was learning.
Do you read a lot of cnovels that only have machine translations (mtl)? Do you want to practice reading chinese, with english translations as a crutch still? Basically: do you want parallel texts of webnovels?
There's a few options that can provide this. For example, right now I use the app Smart Book by KursX (android), i paid $15 dollars once for the lifetime use functions. I upload a chinese book file into it epub or txt (and you can find MANY cnovels if you just web search their chinese title and "txt" or go to a download books free site and search by their chinese title), the app makes a full parallel text and I can just click a little A~ button on the top right of each paragraph for a mtl version shown beneath it. I can also click each individual word for a word translation (which is useful because when mtl screws up grammar or descriptions, translating word by word can help you figure out the actual meaning of the sentence). I can press a little speaker to hear the sentence read aloud. Its a useful app. I can't recommend it wholeheartedly though, because it's not free anymore (i didnt have to pay for these features until yesterday :/). Also, this app didn't exist when I was a beginner unfortunately.
What existed (and still does)? Mtlnovels.com. Go to the site, make an account (you'll need an account for the parallel text feature). Look up whatever webnovel you were going to read in mtl (years ago I looked up Silent Reading by priest on here because it wasn't translated back then), go to the novel on the site. At the top of the chapter you're reading, it will give you an option to Show Original Chinese text. Click that. It will now show you english mtl and chinese sentences in parallel text format. You can then use the english mtl to guess the meaning of bits of the chinese sentences, or just highlight-right click (if on a phone then highlight and press on highted text portion) words/phrases and pick "translate" and google translate will translate those parts (this will work in Chrome, Mozilla, Edge on phone or computer). You now have parallel texts of tons of novels! Note: the text is in traditional characters, and was my first exposure to practicing reading traditional characters (since I learned simplifief first). I do think there's probably ways to switch the text to simplified (maybe a web browser extension). But for me, back then knowing around 500 words, it was fine. Except for some particular characters, many hanzi just had the radicals look less simplified. An additional idea: you can also use TTS text to speech (like Microsoft Edge's nice sounding one) to highlight the chinese and listen to it while having the english machine translation right there for reference.
(My point is, while apps are more convienient in some ways, most stuff can also just be done in a web browser. Nowadays I just read in Edge on my phone, highlight words or phrases and use Translate on them, and use Edge TTS when I want to hear pronunciations. I think Pleco app has BETTER translations and as a beginner was better, and Readibu is also better for translations. But now that I can read better, its more important to me to hear the pronunciation of stuff. Pleco can do TTS too, Readibu cant in the free version. And Edge's TTS just sounds so much better than my phone's built in TTS that Pleco uses).
Another free option, though it has way less to read: Duo Reader app has free parallel texts and TTS features for several languages. I've read bits of Alice in Wonderland in Japanese on the app. (But for me personally, KursX Smart Book app or regular internet Edge app suits my needs better).
