Chinese Sentence Search & Mining
While Chinese Dictionaries are an excellent source for example sentences, the resources below are designed specifically for finding Chinese sentences and seeing how words are used in context.
What Is Sentence Mining?
Sentence mining is a study method where you collect useful, natural Chinese sentences from corpora, sentence databases, or other authentic sources. You can look up unfamiliar words and expressions, save helpful examples, and review them with flashcards or spaced repetition. This builds vocabulary in context and shows how Chinese is naturally used.
What Is a Corpus?
A corpus (plural: corpora) is a searchable collection of real-world written language. Search for a Chinese word or phrase to see how native speakers use it. Some corpora also show common word combinations, usage frequency, and other helpful details.
Sentence Search & Mining Resources
✓ English Friendly Resources
Whether your native language is English or another language, Tatoeba offers Chinese sentences with translations in many languages. Use the “Browse” dropdown menu at the top and select “Browse by language” to get started.
Translations are contributed by Tatoeba users, but I’ve found them to be generally reliable.
Free Web-BasedChinese Language Resources
The Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (Sinica Corpus) was the first balanced Modern Chinese corpus with part-of-speech tagging. It contains more than 10 million words, with texts drawn largely from Taiwanese sources, including newspapers.
You can search by keyword, part of speech, and reduplicated forms, making it useful for seeing how words and grammatical patterns are used in real-world Chinese.
Free Web-Based
BCC 語料庫 is a valuable resource for sentence mining and for seeing how Chinese words are used in real-life contexts. Search for a word, such as 重要 (zhòngyào, important), to find numerous example sentences from literature, news, online posts, and other types of writing.
One standout feature is its collocation search. For example, searching v籃球 (v = verb) shows which verbs commonly pair with 籃球 (lánqiú, basketball), along with frequency statistics. This makes it especially useful for learning natural word combinations and usage.
You can also use n for nouns, a for adjectives, d for adverbs, and q for measure words.
Note: The website is entirely in Chinese and is best suited for intermediate to advanced learners.
Free Web-Based
There are plenty of example sentences to be found here.
The site is entirely in Chinese, but it’s straightforward to use. Simply enter the word or character you want to “mine” in the search box and click the blue button.
Results include English translations, but they can be unreliable. It’s best to focus on the Chinese and translate the sentences yourself.
Free Web-Based
The Peking University Modern Chinese Corpus database offers billions of characters sourced from newspapers, literature, and scientific texts.
Free Web-Based