Kant for dummies

Can someone break it down for me? Wtf was he on about?

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Pedantic goblin liked being a big-brain, hi-iq incel who BTFOd everyone before and after him

Basically the relationship between the known and the knower

You don't need to read Kant to understand Kant. Read Schopenhauer instead, his philosophy is succinct and to the point and a lot more useful.

Our minds have what he calls a priori intuitions and a priori categories. A priori intuitions are space and time. The a priori categories are pic related.

"A priori" means that the intuitions and categories are experienced prior to empirical observation. They are projected onto our experience of the world. For example, the category of causality and dependence allows us to observe causal chains between objects. According to Kant, the when you see a rock fly into a window and smash the window, the causation we observe is not a fact of the event but instead something our minds project onto the event.

This results in there being a phenomenal world and a noumenal world. The phenomenal world is the world that we experience; it is filtered through the intuitions of space and time as well as the twelve categories. The noumenal world is the world independent of our minds, and neither of the intuitions nor any of the categories apply to noumenal objects. What you see in front of you is your computer monitor as a phenomenal object; but you can't know what it's like as a noumenal object. We can't imagine an object that doesn't have a position in space or time and doesn't have the categories applied to it. It is beyond human understanding.

To reiterate, we cannot know anything about noumenal objects. This is because we do not have any empirical experience of them, and they are not a priori but instead a posteriori (knowledge of them requires empirical observation). In addition to the noumenal objects "behind" our phenomenal experience, there are also objects like God that are noumenal because we require empirical observation to confirm or deny any fact about them.

Kant is here trying to solve the divide between the Rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche) and the Empiricists (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume) of the early modern period. The Rationalists thought you could prove certain things (such as God) through mathematics-esque approaches divorced of any empirical observation (a priori), whereas the Empiricists insisted on sensory observation (a posteriori) was the only source of knowledge. Thus, Kant is much like a Rationalist who was very informed by Empiricist concerns. He rejected both the dogma of the earlier Rationalists as well as the skepticism of the Empiricists, and termed his approach "critique". The stuff about our inability to have knowledge of noumena is how he countered the dogma of the Rationalists through Empiricist insights. He countered the skepticism of the Empiricists by asserting that the a priori faculties of the mind are universal among rational beings. This means that every rational being can experience the twelve categories as well as the two intuitions. He also believed this of mathematics and logic, as he thought they were a priori faculties of the mind. So while they are not part of the objective (noumenal) world, they are still universally necessary among us, contra the Empiricists.

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Dubs for good summary. Kant can be BTFOd in certain subtle ways, for instance Mirror test. First, it is ourselves, we, as a thing, literally experience thing-in-itself.
Second, we treat our self-image noumene like any other - we realize the abstract model with the help of the mirror image, the phenomenon in here being the reflection - itself a mere symbol of the true thing, that is us.

In materialist terms, non self-aware mind doesn't experience self because it didn't program the social mirroring neurons we normally use to model introspective images of self (as well of others). All of this can be readily observed on MRI.

Are there any "bad" translations of Kant's work? I bought one at random that I haven't read yet, but I don't want to finish the first critique only to realize it was all mistranslated gibberish

What's the name and translators/editors of your translation?

It's a spanish translation published by ediciones libertador. I know I probably won't get an exact answer here, but generally speaking, can Kant be badly mistranslated? I'll probably use secondary texts and watch sadler's videos to avoid any major mistake

Don't know anything about Spanish translations. I'd be careful like you said, but for all I know it could be good.