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Where can I find audio recordings (i.e. individual MP3s or WAVs) for every Chinese words? 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).

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every Chinese word? – Cocowalla Dec 23 '11 at 12:34
Or at least every combination of phonemes that typically forms a two, three, or four-character words. – Village Dec 23 '11 at 12:36

3 Answers

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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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up vote 1 down vote

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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The pronunciation at this site appears to be made of individually recorded phonemes that are simply played close together, so it is not very natural. – Village Dec 23 '11 at 15:02
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. – Alenanno♦ Dec 23 '11 at 20:30
@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 Li Dec 27 '11 at 3:05
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). – dda Mar 14 at 6:57
up vote 1 down vote

mdbg.net

Each of the words you look up in the dictionary there comes complete with an audio recording.

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I 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? – Alenanno♦ Dec 23 '11 at 20:09
If you are looking for the sentence together, then link will read it to you. Just click the speaker icon. – tbaums Dec 24 '11 at 4:49

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