Was wondering if anyone knew of a source of sample sentences in spoken Chinese? I'd like to search for a word and get a sentence back.

Someone recently posted engkoo.com, but I'm not very impressed by what I'm seeing. Eg even something simple like 只要 gives things like "A word of assent from her sufficed him." Nciku isn't any good either. It's always a bad sign when there are references to the Soviet Union in examples.

Anyone know of anything more colloquial?

Cheers

I have uploaded my collection of subtitles which has 180,000 lines in it temporarily here:

http://jacobrhoden.com/phrases.zip

I use it all the time for exactly what you are describing

Basically I went to one of those subtitle sites and downloaded hundreds of subtitles files for movies and wrote a "script" that converts the subtitles file into a single text file for easy searching and greping.

The word you are asking about appears on 451 lines. Here are some samples:

当然只要成为一个古老东西并永久保存
很简单的，只要在50万人中
我以為我只要去那裡投幾球
我们不想伤人只要银行的钱
我们只要去买个
我们只要听就可以了。
我们只要听见“羽毛”，就马上冲进来
我们只要找一些有魄力的人就行了
我们只要找到合适的木头
我们只要让你不碰到
我们只要让这么一点，她就会骑到我们头上
我们只要那女孩
我们回去只要填一些表格就可以了
我們只要...可以再去換一個有手指的
我发现只要金枪鱼新鲜，就有回头客
只要萨利文以为他是我
只要被抓住
只要装胡涂回去就好了
只要觉得刚好，不多也不少
只要解释清楚
只要让她见到我,我会赢得您女儿的
只要让整个飞机都坠毁的话
只要记住不断提醒你
只要记住我们相伴的每刻

If people are interested in this, I will probably get around to incresing the number of subtitle lines it has from 180k to maybe a million.

Oh, and just a word of caution, as on the TV, some lines are only half of a sentence.

Also, this prases.txt file is the file that the vocabulary list "Top 1000 words found in TV subtitles" is based on.

Wow, possibly 1 million lines... I am impressed, xkfowboa!
It's perhaps a more mundane source but, for what it's worth: I have been using Yellowbridge for a while for a basic dictionary as well as for example sentences and find it useful. They might not be quite au courant but they seem pretty reasonable and cover a variety of applications... worthwhile to me. Here's what I found for 只要:

1. 只要不吃得太多，你可以吃任何东西。
You may eat anything, so long as you don't eat too much.
2. 只要你不出卖我，要我做什么我都愿意。
As long as you don't betray me, I'll do whatever you ask me to (do).
3. 只要有船，我们就尽早装货。
We'll ship the goods at an early time as long as there is a steamer.
4. 只要我活着，我都会帮助你。
As long as live, I will help you.
5. 你只要问他，他就会告诉你。
You have only to ask and he'll tell you.
6. 我不计较价钱，只要车很好用就行了。
I don't care about the price, so long as the car is in good condition.
7. 只要把它完成了，你怎么做我并不计较。
I'm not particular how you do it as long as it gets done.
8. 只要我身体好一定来。
I will come provided that I am well enough.

Lol, its not that hard to get to a million, I just got bored of clicking through the site downloading all the subtitle files one by one (: Its just a bit slow because sometimes they are in zip files so you have to download.. unzip... download.. unzip... download... unzip... etc...

Oh, and no you cant automate it as lots of these subtitle sites have special mechanisms to prevent automated download of all their content.

xkfowboa: That's superb, and you're right - it is exactly what I'm looking for. Wondering if zipping it corrupted the file though? Unable to view it on Mac or PC under any encoding or font. Just gobbledegook :s.

Strange, it was zipped on the command line on my mac "zip phrases.zip phrases.txt" and unzipping worked fine. Oh well here it is unzipped:

http://jacobrhoden.com/phrases.txt

Ah, forcing UTF-8 in browser and all's well now (must have been a weird encoding not working thing).

Many thanks!

this is awesome, xkfowboa

Lol. I seem to have found the Lion King section of it!

Great work, xkfowboa!

@Byzanti: Have you tried just using Google? I use it all the time to check my grammar and make sure I'm using words correctly. For example, input "只要" and look for sources that come from blogs or news sites. This is also a good way to find personal blogs you can use for reading practice - these are a great source of colloquial Chinese, including new slang and abbreviations.

For the most part, there won't be direct translations anywhere, but the sample sentences will be practically unlimited.