How trustworthy is Machine Translation with ASIAN languages?

So I've made some friend when I was abroad in Taiwan and we still communicate sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in Mandarin Chinese, either writing the phonetics or just using the translator.

They did call me out, saying "HEY! you didn't learn Chinese! you used a translator!"

So the same way that we detect something sounds/looks robotic happens on another language.

However, learning a little Chinese I found out that most of the "bad machine translating" came from the WAY it's being translated.
I figured out that maybe the translator, especially from English to Chinese mandarin, translate according to known phrases and sentences.

I may be wrong, but then again, I'm here to be corrected and to learn with you!

So! How trustworthy is Machine Translation with ASIAN languages?

I'm no expert in Asian languages myself, but usually translators (especially Chinese) don't like MT from English to Chinese. Probably the quality dips due to the structural differences between those two languages. Just my two cents anyway.

It would be interesting, though, to know how Asian languages work with MT. Say, what the quality of Japanese-->Korean, or Korean-Chinese is like. Then again, I'm no expert.

francot is correct. Due to the difference in the sentence structure, it is always a challenge with the MT, especially when it is related to archaic or complex Chinese content.

How about word order?
I don't know any Chinese at all, is it similar to English in that regard?

I do know some Japanese, and word order is completely different. I know it is only one aspect, and I am sure there are many other factors to take into consideration... but what do you think? Could that be a problem?

Eidjit, what about Francot's question? How good is MT when used between two Asian languages? Do you know?

I think they will probably work better than English as they all have the root.

There is a gadget called ili that "offline" translates from English to Japanese (vice versa). According to the videos that the company uploads, it is quite accurate.
https://iamili.com/us/