I have this continual frustration of trying to find example usages of less common words, and I usually cant find anything except extremely complex sentences with much more difficult words than the word I am trying to learn.

How do you work around this? I am wondering if anyone here has any good tips on how to find good sample/example sentences for words you are trying to use?

This might fit the bill:

http://tatoeba.org/eng/

@icebear, how much success have you had with tatoeba? My experience with tatoeba, is that if it does have a sentence with a word i am looking for, I don't know the rest of the words either. (:

I ask my teacher to write me an example sentence or two. I also often use the examples from Pleco (default dictionary is generally very good), but check with my teacher first they're ok and not strange.

Tatoeba often doesn't have what I'm looking for. I generally have more success with www.jukuu.com.

Both of these websites are awesome, thank you so much!

http://www.haodic.com/

@董雅各 Assuming your Skritter profile is a accurate account of your progress in Chinese, I think you shouldn't worry about not understanding *random* Chinese sentences at this point (dozens of words). I'd focus on cramming words, studying set sentences from textbooks or lower level podcasts and start worrying more about reading *random, native level* sentences much later on.

Regarding my own use: I never use any of the suggested websites here. At first I relied entirely on podcasts and textbooks, which presented text to me that was composed almost entirely of words I had learned. In the past 6 months (since passing the ~1500 word mark) I've shifted much more heavily towards viewing native media; before that level I would occasionally struggle through a movie or show, but never made big commitments (a whole series, reading a adult book front to back). I think trying to transition from targeted material to native material too early is a big mistake, but that's just my opinion/experience.

You might also consider children's books, or graded readers, but I think the suggested vocabulary for even those starts at around 300 words. Again, I think you're better off expanding vocabulary for now.

@icebear I agree, the more I expand my vocabulary, the more useful sources like tatoeba have become. At 4-500 words, I still don't use it; I just use the example sentences in the textbook that I'm using skritter to practice.

For a new beginner, it's MUCH better to learn very simple sentences in basic (if slightly forced) contexts to begin with, and understanding more complex ones will come much later.

@Byzanti's suggestion is the best if you need additional sentences - I've come across a lot that my teacher says are never used in natural speech.

P.S. The first level of Chinese Breeze graded readers are perfect for practising recognising grammar and sentence structures at about my level, but obviously not everyone is the same. Generally, I wouldn't attempt them before you have a vocabulary to HSK2-ish.

In Skritter, if you click on a character, a window with the lowdown on that character will appear. For example sentences, choose the YellowBridge Dictionary. It has example sentences that are not very demanding. Even if you don't quite understand them yet, they have examples of usage which are very helpful. This window, of course, is very useful in itself.

If you're in the market for a dictionary, take a look at "Tutle Learner's Chinese-English Dictionary". Almost all entries have examples. One of its other advantages is that it is ordered in pinyin and is very nicely laid out.

@junglegirl I have tried jukuu before, it looks great, however I soon discovered some of the english versions of sentences were either really poor, or sometimes even wrong! This fact alone is not a problem to me, but it made me wonder if the chinese was bad as well. I really dont want to use a site that might give me bad grammar.

@icebear Im not sure how you can see my "profile" but I am at about 1200 characters (a lot more words, i dont know how many). I used skritter quite intensely for 6 months, but since moving to Taiwan I dont have time to sit at my computer, The past 8 months I have done all my study on an iPhone app.

@烏龍 I haven't seen this one before. I will test it out a little more. So far it didn't have the first two words I looked up, 開放 and 言語.

@雅各 When you click on someone's name in this forum you see their profile on Skritter (or, are informed that the profile is private). I sometimes try to take that into account when offering advice; in your case your public profile says around a hundred single characters but a only a few dozen words learned - which is why I suggested to just work on building vocab.

Apparently that data isn't entirely reliable! Still, my advice (based on only my personal experience) wouldn't change.

Ah, ok, I thought the same. In that case I'm afraid I can't help much, but what I said still applies to beginners anyways.
Also, it's encouraging to find that even with 1200 characters you still have difficulty with some of the example sentences, I've often looked through Skritter's examples in horror!

http://www.archchinese.com

is a good one for the beginners. The nice thing about it is, if you pay them $30, you can listen or download the native-speaker recordings of the sentences. I had no problem finding the example sentences for the HSK level 5 words.

I use a lot of sample sentences, i look for them everywhere. At first it was hard to find suitable ones. i glance through the Skritter ones, then i check Pleco dictionary and jukuu.com which i access through mdbg and the sample sentences from yellowbridge. I feel that Pleco and Yellowbridge have some beginner-level sentences. I only look for a sentence i understand. If i feel that i understand the grammatical construction but i am missing a verb or a noun than i add this to my study list. I also add the sample sentences in the mnemonics field so i can check them every time i study the word. I have been doing this for a long time and all of sudden i noticed that i can understand a lot more complicated sentences now.

Exactly, I find two scenarios (so far) where sample sentences are quite important for a beginner.

1) A specific word is being particularly hard to remember. (ie i dont worry about it for all words).
2) I am having trouble understanding when is the appropriate point to use a particular word, (ie one of the many words for "often" or one of the many words for "open", etc...)

My problem so far is finding the example sentences is often too time consuming, i usually try a combination of tatoeba and google, but the microsoft dict looks to be quite useful so I will try this as well.