Learning a language is going to take a lot of time and effort, no argument there. But not all methods are equally effective so anything that reduces the time o

Learning a language is going to take a lot of time and effort, no argument there. But not all methods are equally effective so anything that reduces the time or effort required, even if just by 10%, is technically a 'short cut'. And anything that increases your enjoyment of the process is a win, regardless of whether it saves time, since it will help maintain motivation. Losing motivation is surely the most common reason people fail to learn. The main idea here is to reduce the friction of reading as much as possible, freeing up your attention to focus on understanding and enjoying the text. The machine translation is only used here for words and short phrases, where it's more effective than for complete sentences. (I'll take your word for it that google translate isn't so good with English-Chinese, I'm mainly focussed on the European languages for now)