Even for Chinese people, Journey to the West is a somewhat difficult text because it belongs to classical literature. Using some children's books published in recent years, and progressing gradually, might be a better approach?
This is a simplified version: Journey to the West in Easy Chinese by Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang. Otherwise, I would definitely have waited a bit before biting off something like this.
My first concerns though:
1. How can the system know which words I already know.
2. To what degree will I misunderstand the meaning of words.
3. Somewhat related to 2, how inaccurate will be description / explanation of words be.
1. How does it know which words I already know? It doesn’t automatically. You provide that set. For example, if you’ve completed HSK 1, you can paste the HSK 1 word list into LangSeed and mark those as "known". From there, new explanations are constrained to that vocabulary. You can also paste in real text and mark the easy words as known, though that’s a bit more manual.
2. How much might I misunderstand word meanings? Depends on how advanced the vocab is and how large your known-word set is. I think of this as building intuition rather than giving dictionary-precise definitions. As you see words in more contexts, that intuition sharpens. This is just my experience from testing it over the last couple of weeks.
3. How inaccurate are the explanations? I tested it on Swedish (my native language). There are occasional awkward or slightly odd phrasings, but it’s rarely outright wrong.