Free Mandarin resources with pinyin, word-for-word translations and mp3s

*Especially useful for beginners in Mandarin*

Though I prefer to use dialogues and not simply sentences for learning, I think this is a great and extensive collection of useful sentences and audio to raise your awareness of the sentence structure of Mandarin, and probably learn quite a few new words of vocabulary as well.

http://www.zhongwenblue.com/
http://www.zhongwengreen.com/
http://www.zhongwenred.com/

You can read about how I started out in Mandarin here

http://davidamartin2sblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-i-learned-to-understand-1000-words.html