Often when learning new words, I want to see them in context. It helps my learning process, and understanding how to properly use new vocab makes it stick in my mind that much more.
Does anyone have any good suggestions for a site where I can enter a word, and it will give good example sentences based upon that word? Nciku seems to do it for some words, but it's not super complete, so I'd love some more suggestions.
I don't usually answer my own questions, but I was just having a chat with a friend of mine who reminded me about Jukuu which works pretty well for what I was looking for, and has a pretty good selection of words available.
I think both of these sites are pretty good
Check out http://tatoeba.org/. Even though it's more focused in languages in general you can still find some Chinese sentences.
Apart from Jukuu.com as shown above I would suggest checking out the recently compiled Leiden Weibo Corpus for colloquial online usages of terms.
Then there's also Bing's Chinese dictionary (originally called Engkoo) which is also good.
Do you need English translations? If not, try the search function on Weibo ( http://www.weibo.com ); it has loads of real usage examples for any word you can imagine
In my studies and work I found that nciku.com and iciba.com have the most accurate and useful translations. When all else fails, try using a google news search with the word or word phrase in parentheses.
