Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
From the brief time I looked into learning Mandarin yesterday it seems like Chinese in general uses the same "subject, object, verb" format we use so direct translation of a sentence should work well enough.
If there are any people here who actually know the language though I'd be interested in seeing their responses as well.
I have been leaning it 你好:p So i am no expert but i can say that it does have a similar order to things. The characters are not words though but more like chunks of meaning. Like Ni is you and Hao is good. So it translated to hello, but the 2 sections mean you good. Similar to how you can break an english word down like UN-EXPECT-ED each of those sections would be its own character in chinese.
Pinyin is the easy way to learn it. It uses the alphabet we are used to to represent the phonetic sounds of the language. So 你好 is nihao and when you use a program to type pinyin it will turn the pinyin into characters for you.
So while you can generally do things in the same order be careful when editing things not to break up character groups. You might end up breaking your sentence. Also be careful if you use pinyin to make sure you get the right character as the same word in a different tone can have a different character and different meaning.
If the general syntax is correct, maybe just a suggestion on what kind of words to use.
Avoiding idioms/metaphors seems like a great first step, but how do I make sure it doesn't pick some bonkers word in Chinese that throw it off?
general rule for translation programs is talk without contractions or slang.
"You're going to the store today?"
"Are you going to go to the store today?" <--- translate this one
Apparently they use a lot of their own idioms which is cool, but yeah they probably won't know "ours."
As for the bonkers words idk how to verify that. For a laugh though, there's a YouTuber Sora the Troll that has videos that cover that kind of thing for English to Japanese