Chinese Sentence Search & Mining
Chinese Dictionaries are useful for example sentences, but the resources below make it easier to search for Chinese sentences and see how words and phrases are used in context.
What Is Sentence Mining?
Sentence mining is a study method where you collect sentences containing useful vocabulary, grammar or expressions you want to learn. Instead of memorizing words in isolation, you keep the full sentence to see how the language works in context.
What Is a Corpus?
A corpus (plural: corpora) is a searchable collection of real-world language. Search for a Chinese word or phrase to see how it appears in authentic sentences and contexts. Some corpora also show common word combinations, frequency and patterns of usage.
✓ English-Friendly Resources
★ Search words and phrases in context using a large collection of translated example sentences. Tatoeba is a free, collaborative database of sentences and translations that lets learners search Mandarin words and phrases to see how they are used in context. Mandarin entries can include Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Pinyin transcriptions, translations in other languages, and audio recordings for thousands of sentences.
✓ English-Friendly - Free Web-BasedResources in Chinese
★ Search more than 11 million words from a tagged, balanced corpus of modern Chinese. Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese is a free online corpus containing more than 19,000 texts collected from 1981 to 2007. Search words in context and narrow results by part of speech, genre, style, medium, or topic, with sentences segmented and tagged for linguistic analysis.
Free Web-Based
★ Search billions of Chinese characters across modern, historical and specialized language collections. BCC Corpus is a free online Chinese corpus from Beijing Language and Culture University that lets users search authentic language examples across news, literature, spoken Chinese, modern historical Chinese, classical Chinese and a balanced multi-domain collection. Search results can be used to examine words, grammatical patterns, frequency and usage in context, while downloadable character and word frequency data are also available.
Free Web-Based
★ Provides detailed bilingual dictionary entries with pronunciation help and extensive example sentences. iCIBA (金山词霸) is a free online Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionary with definitions, pinyin for Chinese entries, pronunciation information, phrases, and bilingual examples showing words in context. The site also offers text, document, image, and webpage translation tools.
Free Web-Based
★ Search billions of characters of modern, classical, bilingual and learner Chinese to see how words and expressions are used in context. Peking University CCL Corpus is a free, noncommercial academic corpus with modern Chinese, ancient Chinese, Chinese-English bilingual texts and Chinese produced by second-language learners. Its search tools include standard, advanced, batch and pattern searches, with options for narrowing results by time period, text type and corpus collection. Use this corpus to investigate real-world usage, vocabulary patterns and language across an extensive collection of Chinese texts.
Free Web-Based