One of the example sentences turned out to be:

"学习英语口语不只是玩游戏而已.
xuéxí yīngyǔ kóuyǔ bù zhǐ shì wányóuxì éryǐ.
Spoken English learning is not all beer and skittle."

I would translate it as "Studying spoken English is not just playing games." Where did beer and skittle come from? Is this some regional English? It certainly isn't American...

Where do these example sentences come from again?

Judging by the translations, many of them are clearly translated by non-native speakers. If you've ever taught English in a Chinese university, you'll see how much value a lot of students put on idioms here, and their sources don't really indicate whether an idiom is modern, antiquated, or localized, so you see and hear a lot of that here.

Being no doubt a very useful feature, those example sentences are often odd and sometimes even plainly wrong. For example, I was confused by the following sentence: "这些邮件是在您离线时发送的。". My wife explained that this sentence is incorrect. The right way to say this would be "这是为了她自己好" or "这对她自己有好处".

Sorry to question you, Shisoik, but I don't really see the correlation between the first sentence you gave and either of the corrections...

Just from Dict.cn for now. Yeah, there are some mistakes yet. While we haven't built the tool to fix bogus ones that are reported, I try to comfort myself by thinking that at least they're sometimes hilarious. Beer and skittle!

"Skittles" is British for a bowling game ("Ninepin", apparently). For "beer and skittles" see

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/230200.html

or

http://www.word-detective.com/2010/01/05/beer-and-skittles/

I see nothing wrong with studying idioms as long as you keep in mind they might be arcane or out of date. I have a Chinese language exchange partner here in NYC and I do my best to teach him only the most current NYC slang. We went to a concert where he learned to chant "Hip hop! Don't stop! Body rock!" but I cautioned him that this was getting to be kind of old-school.

James

I'm English, and although I have heard of Skittles, I have never seen this idiom used before.

Another fun one, not quite as bad, that I noticed today:

"我一文不名,因此不能付钱给你.
wǒ yìwénbùmíng, yīncǐ bù néng fùqián gěi nǐ.
I haven't a bean, so I can't pay you."

FatDragon, you are right. I copied the wrong sentence from GMail by accident. The sentence I meant is the following: "这是为了对她自己有好处". Thank you!

各位女士,先生,现在我为你们介绍一位舞台和银幕上着名的明星,约翰·韦恩

Ladies and gentlemen, now I will introduce to you the renowned star of the stage and screen, John Wayne.

It is for the character 韦. That one made me laugh.