Where can I find audio recordings (i.e. individual MP3s or WAVs) for every Chinese word? I have found some recordings of Chinese, but these only contain individual phonemes, not entire words. I am looking for something to download or as something to buy (e.g. as part of a dictionary).
4 Answers
For example, you can go to Forvo.com. (You can find the Chinese section at this address; on the right you see the top users that provided most audios.)
It's a huge database of words, characters, expressions in any language provided by users. The good thing is there's a lot of stuff, but the down-side is that although some users provided many audios (so you have a sort of consistency), you'll have to switch between different audios not recorded professionally, although they usually are not low quality.
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In addition, when a word does not have a recording, you can request one. In my experience, the new recording will become available within a day.– TsundokuAug 9, 2016 at 10:11
Each of the words you look up in the dictionary there comes complete with an audio recording.
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1I tried searching for "你好吗", but it gives only the three readings in sequence, not one recording of the sentence... Or did I miss the feature?– AlenannoDec 23, 2011 at 20:09
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Another web site is http://www.iciba.com where you can find not only the pronunciation of Chinese characters and words, but also their meaning in English and Chinese.
Update
This site has real person readings, but unfortunately the site is totally in Chinese:
http://www.caca8.net/zi/py/ — single characters
http://www.caca8.net/ci/ — words
http://www.caca8.net/chy/ — idioms
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1The pronunciation at this site appears to be made of individually recorded phonemes that are simply played close together, so it is not very natural.– VillageDec 23, 2011 at 15:02
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Nice update by the way... I can't understand the site since it's in Chinese, but can you look if there's a mention whether the audios are downloadable or not? Thanks.– AlenannoDec 23, 2011 at 20:30
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@Alenanno The pronunciations are in flash files, so it's really difficult to download the audio files if not possible. But they have a free desktop version of the dictionary can be downloaded from onlinedown.net/soft/109615.htm– Bruce LiDec 27, 2011 at 3:05
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The files can be downloaded -- technically, if maybe not legally -- with this pattern URL: caca8.net/fayin/XXXXXX.mp3 where XXXXXX is the pinyin (a1, ba2, etc).– ddaMar 14, 2013 at 6:57
You can do this with Google Translate. To get downloads in mp3 format, see responses to this Stack Exchange question.