Newspapers are likely a bad choice, yes. I've thought about this a bit. Subtitles seem good, and there are corpora of casual speech. I plan to heavily bias tow

Newspapers are likely a bad choice, yes. I've thought about this a bit. Subtitles seem good, and there are corpora of casual speech. I plan to heavily bias towards verbs. Nouns are much more long-tailed, and their frequency is "bursty" --- if the noun is relevant to the situation, it'll be used a lot. So you can get them when you need them. Otherwise you can always use a pronoun, or be vaguer.