I just came across the site "www.dict.cn" and I really like its thorough examples. Many of the words I looked up have five or more example sentences with English translations. It looks like a particularly fantastic resource for learning words that translate to roughly the same thing in English but are not used quite the same in Chinese.
For example, try looking up 检查 and 查看 and you will immediately, from the examples, infer that the former is used to describe closely examining a single thing, whereas the latter is used to describe larger-scale examination of an area or of multiple things. Those are two words that I've asked four or five native speakers to disambiguate, and none of them have been able to do it. Likewise 而且 and 并且 -- if I'd known about dict.cn six months ago I would have bugged far fewer of my Chinese friends about those two.
If Pleco could license the dictionary that site is using, wow, would that ever be useful. (So much so that I'm tempted to write a little code and go download MakePlecoDict, but much better to license it for real.)
For example, try looking up 检查 and 查看 and you will immediately, from the examples, infer that the former is used to describe closely examining a single thing, whereas the latter is used to describe larger-scale examination of an area or of multiple things. Those are two words that I've asked four or five native speakers to disambiguate, and none of them have been able to do it. Likewise 而且 and 并且 -- if I'd known about dict.cn six months ago I would have bugged far fewer of my Chinese friends about those two.
If Pleco could license the dictionary that site is using, wow, would that ever be useful. (So much so that I'm tempted to write a little code and go download MakePlecoDict, but much better to license it for real.)