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I am looking for the best website or resource for searching for natural sample sentences for any given Japanese word. There are a lot of online dictionaries these days, but sometimes the examples are not curated properly and the sentences can be very strange.

I'd like some advice from native speakers of Japanese on what they consider the best dictionary/online resource which contains practical, natural and useful sample sentences when searching for a word.

Here's an example. I can search for the word 衰える and find on jisho.org:

薪が足りず、はやくも火勢が衰えはじめた暖炉。
This strikes me as an example which is less useful than the following, from kotobank.jp:

記憶力が衰える
This is simple and useful. I favor sites like kotobank but they don't always have sample sentences.

Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated.

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  • A lot of the sentences used on jisho.org ultimately come from the Tanaka Corpus, which has problems. I prefer to get example sentences either from published dictionaries (which use short sentences) or “in the wild”.
    – JAM
    Commented Mar 23, 2019 at 16:09
  • @JAM Lol, just out of curiosity, I checked out these problems. Funny. "If these sentences are a high percentage of your "Japanese input," you may be indirectly learning unnatural-sounding Japanese, which could affect the way you sound when you speak Japanese, in much the same way as men who learn most of their Japanese from a girlfriend start to sound a bit gay". 笑〜
    – jarmanso7
    Commented Jun 1, 2020 at 8:29

2 Answers 2

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I'm not a native speaker like you requested, but this is free, searchable online corpus that I would highly recommend. Maybe some native speakers could comment on it?

http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/search_form

Using your example, I suggest typing in「衰え」in the search bar (so that you can pick up all of the conjugations) and then only checking the two "Yahoo!" entries. I think you'll find a lot of "natural" examples like you're looking for.

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    It may be worth noting that you have to agree to the terms of use at the bottom of the page before the page with the search bar appears.
    – user3856370
    Commented Feb 15, 2019 at 16:09
  • Yes I am aware of this resource and I agree that it's very good ! Thanks.
    – kandyman
    Commented Feb 16, 2019 at 16:47
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I recently found this. It seems to be generated by crawling news sites and parsing them. The results might not be what you're looking for as it's seems mostly to be formal language. However, it should at least be fairly natural and high quality examples of formal language used fairly recently.

For the word 衰える here are the first examples:

加齢とともに衰える筋力と注意力。 (www.nhk.or.jp, crawled on 23/09/2018)

春節後もその加熱ぶりは衰えるどころかさらにヒートアップ。 (j.people.com.cn, crawled on 05/09/2018)

クラフトビールの流行は当分衰える気配はない。 (www.jiji.com, crawled on 07/09/2018)

全身の筋肉が衰える筋ジストロフィー患者だ。 (www.kyoto-np.co.jp, crawled on 10/09/2018)

初期症状や原因を解説 筋肉が衰えるALS（筋萎縮性側索硬化症）とは？ (www.nhk.or.jp, crawled on 31/08/2018)

筋肉が衰えるALS（筋萎縮性側索硬化症）とは？ (www.nhk.or.jp, crawled on 31/08/2018)

意欲は衰えるどころかますます高まっている。 (www.worldtimes.co.jp, crawled on 07/09/2018)

盲導犬は視力や足腰が衰える１０歳をめどに引退。 (www.topics.or.jp, crawled on 06/09/2018)

加齢とともに運転能力が衰えるのは当たり前。 (news.yahoo.co.jp, crawled on 31/08/2018)

そしてまだまだ衰える気配はありません。 (news.yahoo.co.jp, crawled on 11/09/2018)

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