I did some amateurish attempts on pairing new vocab-items with example sentences from a (large) database. I would like to extend my database of example sentences. So far I have:

-smartfm Chinese Media 1-5
-smartfm Chinese Charachters 1-10
-Zhongwen Red from this thread: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=4405

Those seem to be the only freely available sources that include sound. I have extracted some example sentences from ChinesePod. But that is a lot of work and there are probably copyright issues.

How good are the example sentences from http://www.nciku.com ? Is there a way to batch download them? Any other ideas from where to get quality sentences?

nciku is pretty hit or miss. Although most of them are very good, there are some duds.

Quote:Any other ideas from where to get quality sentences?

GLOSS is a decent resource that goes from very basic to very advanced. Here's an example:

http://gloss.dliflc.edu/products/gloss/c...fault.html

you also have tatoeba project which now contains near 10 000 chinese example sentences

http://tatoeba.org/eng/home

they nearly have all been added by natives or checked by natives, and around 20% of them have high quality audio
for example http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/334050

moreover the website itself is collaborative, so you can add your sentences (as long as they're not protected by copyright) / audios / translation, and ask for review, or have explanation if one of the sentences seems odd to you, and then reuse them for whatever you want (even in commercial product)

you can also make list of sentences and export them in anki format,
browse sentences by tags (proverb , basic sentences etc. , though this feature has been added a week ago)


EDIT: Oh and there are some tools around this
http://tatoeba.org/eng/tools/index

Thanks for the heads-up on tatoeba. Since I see that you are a staff-member I would like to ask some questions:
Is there a way, to see if a sentence has been proofread?
Downloading ALL the sentences (in chinese) is probably not possible because of bandwidth concerns?
Is there a way to search for audiosentences only?

For lists with entries with audio it would be sweet to be able to download the audio too into anki.

for proofreading
* a sentence which is not set as belonging to someone is not be trusted (though you still can ask if this sentence is correct or not, or if this sentence is correct you can "adopt' it , or post a comment to say this sentence is "ok" this way if everyone do like you, the proofreading will be really quick)

* you still can check the profile of the owner, to see if he's a native or not, most of the time active contributor have set in their profile their level in all the language they contribute in

in a near feature, we're going to set a special "ok" tag, to make proofreading more reliable, and to have a systematic way to know if a sentence is correct

for downloading, every week we make an export of the database, as the database is feed by Internet user, it's normal that every internet user can reuse for whatever he want
http://tatoeba.org/fre/download_tatoeba_..._sentences
we don't have a per language file, but basically you can filter on the "cmn" lang (it's the international code for mandarin chinese, as there's also cantonese, shanghainese and teotchew) , maybe if a lot of people is interested by the downloading feature we will consider make possible to have directly a file per language

for bandwidth, we hope you're all adults guys, the project is 100 % free, you can even download everything and reuse it to make money, we're nice (no?:p), so be nice, don't dowload it several time a week and everything will be fine
(by the way if you want to make a bittorrent of these file, feel free to do it, it will save us bandwith and ease the spread of our project, and as for any "reuse" we just need you to say where the file/sentences come from )


* search audio sentences only
I will tell you a secret, I'm working on this right now ;-) , but to give you an idea here is the current audio stat
~1800 in mandarin (~20%)
~200 in shanghainese (~70%)
~1500 in French (~5%)
~100 in Dutch (~3%)
it's not really big amount but all these audio are high quality one and we're on the way for recording

for downloading audio, yes you can (I've said it, everything is free and reusable) rightclick on the button (save as) and here you are
but I know it's not convenient at all, so as we're doing the recording with the excellent shtooka project,
http://swac-collections.org/download.php so I don't know if you know but here you have all the HSK words recorded and on anki you have a "swac/shtooka" plugin to directly link your words to the corresponding shtooka audio, life is nice huh ?:p

if you want to listen them online
example http://swac-collections.org/overview.php?lang=cmn
so basically we will give them our collection of sentences audio (they already have the shanghainese one) per language, this way with the anki plugin, you will be able to have them easily in your anki

if you have other questions, I'm here

PS: if you or someone else make a torrent, can you tell me (it's also true about any reuse of our data, it's not mandatory, but you know, it's always nice to see other people find what you do useful )

just to say now it's possible to view sentences with audio only