Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

by vikrum • 3 years ago

548 331 3 years ago

fallat• 3 years ago

This is an incredible tool. I would love this for French.

hmry• 3 years ago

Well you're in luck, because it supports French too, and dozens of other languages. You can click on the "English" with the little triangle to change the language

TontonNestor• 3 years ago

It does French too. Just click on English and a drop down menu appears.

teach• 3 years ago

This is really interesting! Instead of "here's how you are SUPPOSED to pronounce" any given word or phrase, you show how a bunch of native English speakers actually pronounce it.

Maybe everyone is wrong, but if your goal is to be understood then you'd be better mimicking what they do than just being technically correct. :)

For example, there's a street in the city I live in spelled "Guadalupe". Natives pretty much uniformly pronounce it GWAD-uh-LOOP.

narag3• 3 years ago

That's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.

camoufleur• 3 years ago

I think that's their point. I think the proper (Spanish) pronunciation is gwah-dah-loo-peh.

MeImCounting2• 3 years ago

I did not know it was a river in Spain, coming from the US I had always assumed it was some catholic religious phrase or a mispronunciation of a native word.

It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP" but I guess its not even that bad compared to many mispronunciations

aatd86• 3 years ago

There is an island in the French carribean called "Guadeloupe" which is pronunced the same. Don't know if these are related too.

bsimpson• 3 years ago

San Francisco is famously a hodgepodge of Spanish-looking names with canonical hybrid pronunciations.

- Divisadero: duh viz uh derro

- Arguello: are goo-ell o

- San Rafael: san ruff ell

- Tomales: tuh mal es

- Gough: gawff (not Spanish, but still surprising)

inanutshellus• 3 years ago

aaand that reminds me of "Torpenhow Hill".

When the Saxons arrived and asked the Welsh the name of that hill, the Welsh said “pen” which means "hill" in Welsh. So the Saxons used their word for hill, “tor,” and called it Torpen (hill hill). Then the Norse arrived and the same process added the their world for hill “Haugr”. So now it was Torpen Haugr (Hill Hill Hill). Later, the English called it Torpenhow Hill (Hill Hill Hill Hill)

Turns out the rise near the village of Torpenhow isn't named Torpenhow Hill, but I digress... Here's a quick YT on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo

gilleain3• 3 years ago

Yeah I jut looked up some examples from this list <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49813249> starting with 'Frome'.

The first video hit had someone pronouncing it rhyming with 'home' when it's meant to be "Froom".

Ok, so it got 'Ballachulish' from a video specifically about Scottish Gaelic. (As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?)

Scarblac• 3 years ago

As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?

Same way as every other English word - the spelling seems unrelated to the pronunciation.

I've never heard this word. Is the 'gh' part pronounced as in though or as in tough?

ehnto4• 3 years ago

Unless you are in my city, where it is Frome like home. It's probable the whole city is wrong, since the namesake is British, but no one will recognize a Froom street.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

That's similar to the technique I sometime use when I hesitate between two spellings or expressions. I do a Google search of both, the one with the most results wins. There is a website called Googlefight that does that for you, but it doesn't seem to work anymore.

It may not be correct by the book (though it usually is), but it is what people use.

shadowgovt2• 3 years ago

Language (especially spoken language, most especially English) doesn't really have a "right" or "wrong." It has "likely to be understood by receiver" and "unlikely to be understood by receiver."

The real correct answer to anyone's "what's the right way to say...?" question is a probability distribution.

blackoil• 3 years ago

Language do have right and wrong pronunciation and, in many cases, it is also tied to the script. e.g. in Hindi position of tongue, lips and sound from vocal cord is defined for every phoneme.

That's why games like spelling bee make no sense because if you can hear the word, you can write it there is no ambiguity. Some may pronounce words it differently, but they are mostly different dialects. Or in some cases it is accepted as wrong but common pronunciation.

ozzmotik2• 3 years ago

don't forget the manchaca (now menchaca as it should have been the whole time!) being said as "man-CHAK".

that or the one from the other major city, good ol kuykendahl aka "kir-KEN-doll"

kwk12• 3 years ago

The Pedernales River: PUR-də-NAL-iss

Affric• 3 years ago

I agree with you but nativised nouns are an edge case that you likely can never stamp out without a huge amount of context that would neuter any usefulness the tool has.

Like any tool for language learning its big limitation is the fact that it appears to be writing based.

m4633• 3 years ago

that's a perfect example.

reminds me of that "what would a 5th grader say" skit where the "which president" answer was something like benjamin franklin...

sltkr• 3 years ago

Nucular. It's pronounced nucular.

DontchaKnowit3• 3 years ago

Nah its pronounced nuclear. A lot of people mess it up but most people pronounce it correctly. Its sorta like library -> libary. Its a common mispronounciation but it is pretty universally recognized as wrong.

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

Same for Hermosa Beach, Los Gatos, and many other CA towns. Even though I speak Spanish, I'm always caught off-guard when someone pronounces these places the Spanish way.

toast02• 3 years ago

The one that weirds me out is San Pedro, CA vs San Pedro Square in San Jose, CA.

The first one is pronounced peedrow, nearly always. The second one is pronounced paydrow (as it would be in Spanish, or for a person), most of the time. San is optional for San Pedro, but not for San Pedro Square.

ehnto4• 3 years ago

That's a big part of immersion learning techniques, which even go as far as having you pick a "parent" to binge watch as you will naturally imitate their accent and cadence.

That's the theory there too, if you wamt to speak like a native, let your brain bathe in native speaking and it will be absorbing all the nuance that won't be in textbooks or classrooms.

DontchaKnowit3• 3 years ago

Oh man, one of the worst examples of this.

Versailles missouri. They pronounce it "ver-sail-ees"

Brajeshwar3• 3 years ago

When I first landed up in Austin, Texas that's what I look around the street and went hmmmm, perhaps, I need to learn a tad bit of Spanish -- at-least swear words.

formerly_proven• 3 years ago

Though some British YouTubers emulate some kind of posh enunciation (or what is perceived as such), which is really just weird and jarring

thomasfromcdnjs• 3 years ago

This is beautiful.

Beyond pronunciation, I want to know how to use words in a sentence.

(I play a lot of Scrabble and constantly looking up words I don't know to try incorporate them in my daily speech, this will help a lot)

brobinson• 3 years ago

Wiktionary will go into exhaustive detail (perhaps too much detail) about all the use cases of a word, including example sentences: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronunciation

Works great for Chinese and Japanese, too.

wahnfrieden2• 3 years ago

So how might they be harvesting YouTube transcripts? I know of userscripts that can do it, but anything in the backend I'm not sure how they'd do it without ToS issues

piyh2• 3 years ago

Nothing in the official YouTube API allows you to download captions. Even if you could, you'd be rate limited really hard because the YouTube API does not have any paid tiers and you can get cut off at any point.

Websites like this exist because the eye of Sauron has not yet gazed upon the land.

wahnfrieden2• 3 years ago

They have enough of an archive to not need to grow it if they get cut off somehow

modeless5• 3 years ago

I use Youglish all the time as a native speaker, it's awesome. Usually it confirms my suspicion that words I'm unsure of are actually pronounced both ways by different people. But occasionally I'm surprised.

blankton• 3 years ago

A great project. I tried searching for the german word "Eichhörnchen" and the third pronounciation was in swiss german. That is a different language. Use with caution :)

stratom• 3 years ago

It even found one occurence of an Austrian slang pronounciation of "Eichhörnchen": "Oachkatzl"

Though, in the video it is wrongly claimed that "Oachkatzlschwoaf" would mean squirrel, but in fact it means tail of a squirrel (Eichhörnchenschwanz).

skykooler3• 3 years ago

Which I've only encountered as the name of a Trackmania map.

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

Pro tip: Use YouTube to learn the pronunciation of non-English words, too!

Hors d'oeuvres: https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM

Châteauneuf-du-Pape: https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E

Laphroaig: https://youtu.be/UdE20EFNDUs

hybridtupel• 3 years ago

This is hurting my ears. There is something similar for German: E.g. Zucchini: https://youtu.be/RqPqOTFh-Sc

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

Hors d'oeuvres: https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM > Châteauneuf-du-Pape: https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E

Are these jokes? It's not at all the french pronunciation of these. As in: it's so wrong a native french speaker won't even have a clue what you're trying to say (it's so off base it's totally impossible).

Try to pronounce "pneu" (tire) in french, that's good one:

https://youtu.be/q8aDEF7FH8o

(and that's the real, proper, correct, pronunciation of "pneu" in french)

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Are these jokes?

It would seem they are, yes.

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

Yes, they're jokes. They delighted me so much that I was compelled to share them.

gilleain3• 3 years ago

yes they are not great jokes. 'laphroaigh' is la-frayg i guess.

More <https://www.thrillist.com/spirits/scotch/how-to-pronounce-sc...>

johncessna• 3 years ago

really good idea. I already use youtube for name pronunciation and this just hones that search better than hoping youtube's search comes through.

codeTired• 3 years ago

My shitty polish accent makes me unique though.

guntherhermann• 3 years ago

Wow, what a fantastic website. Thank you! It's great that it has other languages, as I'm fairly decent in English, but given that it's real examplse, and it highlights the text... brilliant design choice

downWidOutaFite• 3 years ago

If you actually learned using this you might end up with a mishmash of British and American pronunciations.

scraptor• 3 years ago

Very nice idea and great execution. Sometimes it includes clips where the generated subtitles are wrong and the word is actually a different one with similar pronunciation (German heiß -> heißt for a lot of this). Which brings to mind an interesting bias where it leaves out any examples that the AI transcription didn't recognise as the word, thus presenting only the "canonical" pronunciation according to whatever process trained the AI and potentially propagating AI artifacts into the speech of actual humans.

sinkwool• 3 years ago

Or it could be a typo (as in man-made) My guess is that they only use Youtube videos that already have subtitles in the target language.

But I'm curious to know how exactly they've built their database of videos/transcripts. I wonder if they curate the videos manually at all.

layer8• 3 years ago

C# and C++ devolve to just C, unfortunately. And I’m still not sure how to pronounce Azure. ;)

deadbeeves8• 3 years ago

I believe it's supposed to be like "erasure" without the "er".

jcq3• 3 years ago

I guess it leverages LLMs to do semantic search on YouTube audio dataset?

qntty• 3 years ago

Systems like this predate LLMs. For example this one at UCLA https://tvnews.sscnet.ucla.edu/public/. Looks like this one has been around for a while https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://youglish....

elicash• 3 years ago

I found it odd their first two examples were power and courage, where the first example ("power") is an American, the second speaker ("courage") is British. I'm picturing myself using a tool like this with an unfamiliar language where it wouldn't be immediately obvious to me, say Spanish in Spain vs Mexico, and getting very confused, very quickly.

I like it in concept, though!

filereaper2• 3 years ago

This is a very interesting site.

I took the name "Regina" as an example as its pronounced very differently between Canada/UK and US.

If you toggle through the site's region selectors it does indeed produce videos with the regionally correct pronouciation. (Admittedly I had a sample size of N=1 video each)

So yeah, its a great start!

mathieuh• 3 years ago

I assume in Canada/UK it rhymes with vagina? That's probably because the royal cipher of Elizabeth II was ER, with the 'R' being for Regina (Latin for 'queen'). So I would imagine that people have heard it in that context before.

Just looking at it it looks like it should be pronounced "redgEEnuh".

filereaper2• 3 years ago

Yeah that's exactly right.

I was only aware of the Canada/UK version and was caught off guard when used on a colleague that used "redgEEnuh" for their name.

alister• 3 years ago

Another useful site for hearing pronunciations is Forvo:

https://forvo.com/

Those are user contributed pronunciations, so there was an effort to say the word clearly. Although Youglish might be more authentic in a sense, I prefer hearing a word enunciated precisely if I want to learn the pronunciation. And I want to hear it in isolation, at least the first time, rather than in the middle of long sentence.

shijie• 3 years ago

Something I’ve learned as someone with high proficiency in another language that I learned in adulthood (I would never say fluent, maybe “functionally” fluent):

Poor pronunciation (I.e. thick accent) but good grammar is usually more forgiven by a native than great pronunciation but poor grammar. Because then you sound more native, but you sound a bit… mentally slow.

I am in the latter camp. My Mandarin Chinese accent is really quite good. But I sound like a child.

So my suggestion to all learning a new language: keep a bit of your accent and heavily index on correct grammar and vocab and listening skills.

zwieback• 3 years ago

I agree. I've been speaking (American) English 99% of the time for the past thirty years but still have a noticeable German accent, never get any flak for that. Apparently Joseph Conrad spoke with a heavy Polish accent so that's my excuse.

What's sad is that educated people look down on people speaking "grammatically incorrect" even if their way of speaking is consistent within their group and conveying meaning perfectly. I just call that snobbery.

init• 3 years ago

Henry Kissinger has a heavy German accent that didn't prevent him from becoming one of the most influential American politicians of the 20th century.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

but still have a noticeable German accent

my German accent only got less notable after speaking a ton of English living in English speaking countries for several years. For some reason losing the accent was way harder than getting rid of an accent in French.

Especially words like 'strength'. If German is your first language there is something about 'r' and 'th' sounds that's so hard to get right.

hyggetrold• 3 years ago

but still have a noticeable German accent, never get any flak for that.

My experience of working with Germans in tech is that the accent is actually an asset. It's totally playing into a certain stereotype of all Germans being great engineers. "I mean...he is German...he must be smart!"

queuebert3• 3 years ago

The problem I've had with Mandarin is keeping my accent means imparting tones to the words which could change their meaning. But I agree with your general point.

mkarrmann• 3 years ago

There's a difference between an accent and incorrect pronunciation, and using the wrong tone is the latter.

yafbum2• 3 years ago

Related things I've learned after moving to US:

- If your accent is not noticable, people will assume you have native-like fluency, speak fast and use colloquialisms that you may have trouble understanding. Try to work on comprehension at least as much as accent.

- Everyone in the English-speaking world has an accent anyways. Californians don't speak like Texans, English don't speak like Scottish, there are people throughout the former Commonwealth that speak a version of English that is what "native" means in their country but sounds like acquired language to others.

- When speaking with people who lack fluency in comprehension, better to speak their language if you can, even if you struggle with it. They will have less trouble detecting your incorrect expression. Too often, people who lack fluency in comprehension are afraid to say they don't understand.

bluGill• 3 years ago

I.can often tell people who a fluent non native speakers because I can't figure out where they are from. Different areas have different accents and foreign learners end up with a very understandable accent that is an average that no native speaks.

gerdesj3• 3 years ago

All countries/languages have multiple accents. My mother was from Devon (and the forties!) and could make herself nigh on unintelligible to me and my brother and I lived in Plymouth (Devon) for eight years.

You are probably familiar with the generic south west of England accent - "aarr me hearties" and all that fake pirate bollocks. Now listen to the greatest Cockney who ever lived - Dick van Dyke - "Cor blimey Mary Poppins. Very different accents. If you drift up north, why not take a detour via Wales - several accents, quite noticeable when put side by side. The midlands has the Black country "yam yam" and Brummie, go east and there is a whole host of the bloody things. Carry on up and you got "eee bah gum" - Yorkshire and more - bear in mind that Yorkshire alone has a larger population than each of the other nations of the UK and is rather more diverse than even many Yorkies think. Lancs, Mancs and Cheshire, oh and don't forget Liverpudlean (find a recording of the Beatles speaking - they are from Liverpool). Nip on up through Geordie land and Cumbria (Cumbric has only recently died out as another Brythonic language). The Borders, where England and Scotland blur somewhat and the it gets a bit tartan flavoured.

Scotland manages to deploy a lot of accents for roughly 5.5M people. Glasgow and Edinburgh are distinguishable for me and they are only about 50 miles apart. There's Aberdeeeeeen and Perrrrrth and many more!

Over in Ireland (the island) there are several accents. The Dublin "brogue" is considered the easiest accent for a foreigner to understand, which is quite ironic. The Republic of Ireland is home to multiple accents as is Northern Ireland (UK).

The accent that D van D deploys in Mary Poppins is generally known as "Mockney" and that pirate thing is a variety of "Mummerset". Mummer is an old word for actor and Somerset is in the south west of England. This comment is getting lengthy, so I won't delve into Cockney rhyming slang, which is worth looking up if you fancy a right larf, me old septic 8)

smcl• 3 years ago

Fellow good accent, poor grammar haver (but in Czech) - hello! I agree completely. In fact we are not alone, here’s a video where a YouTuber is praised for his use of English (including contemporary idioms etc) in comparison to someone who has a good accent but comparatively poor command of the language itself: https://youtu.be/-81TSnMUA68?si=4j4mxiSssnQIBVRq

Personally when it comes to speaking English I find a false American or English accent quite unnerving.

bafe3• 3 years ago

That's been my strategy for a long time and indeed it seems to pay off more than any of my other friends who have a perfect pronunciation but can hardly detect sarcasm or can't write a complex text

praveen9920• 3 years ago

I will have to disagree here. I have a South Indian accent and a good grip on grammar, at least when I'm speaking, Most of the native English speakers I encountered had trouble understanding some of the words I was pronouncing even if it was within context.

My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.

deadbeeves8• 3 years ago

I think what the GP means is that if you speak in grammatically correct sentences and are intelligible, people are less likely to complain or look down on you. I.e. that's a deliberate choice on the listener. If your pronunciation is so off that your listener can't understand you then that's something that's outside of their control; either they pretend to understand and go "uh-huh", or they have to ask you to repeat yourself.

My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.

Nah. People get used to understand certain sequences of sounds and eventually get used to your particular accent, even if initially they had no idea what you were saying. One time I had to work with a Vietnamese woman (let's call her Anna) who said "transaction" like "trunsun" or something; definitely one syllable too few. After several months I was quite able to understand most of what she said, although occasionally I needed her teammate (Barbara) to translate for us. To restate GP's point, both Anna and Barbara spoke grammatically correct English and had definite East Asian accents, but Barbara pronounced things correctly and Anna didn't, so Barbara was easier to speak with, while when speaking with Anna I often had to ask her to repeat herself.

diehunde• 3 years ago

Is that common though? I haven't met people that have a great pronunciation but poor grammar in a second language.

rafaelvasco• 3 years ago

For me it was all about listening to a lot of people talking in English, memorizing the exact sounds and pronunciation. And then reading books out loud everyday. It helps that I have a very good ear, but it should work for anyone.

lottin5• 3 years ago

Without proper knowledge of English phonetics and dialects, this method isn't going to take you very far. For example, in English, vowel length carries phonetic information, whereas in other languages it does not. If you mother tongue happens to fall in the latter category, it's extremely unlikely that you'll figure out how vowel length works, or even that you have to pay attention to it.

deadbeeves8• 3 years ago

That's not true. I use stress timing without even realizing that I'm using it nor understanding what it means, but I can realize when someone doesn't use it. I learned it purely by ear, by mimicking the sounds other people make. More specifically, by copying their cadence.

shadowgovt2• 3 years ago

This makes me legit tear-up, it's such a good idea. Best mashup of technologies I've seen in a while.

smokel• 3 years ago

As a non-native speaker, I was interested in learning the perfect British accent. Turns out there is no such thing. There are many different accents, but none of them is the default.

"Received pronunciation" [1] probably comes closest, but apparently it makes you sound like someone who is a non-native speaker and who tried to learn a default accent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation

tarkin22• 3 years ago

In fact, I find it strange when Germans, for example, have a 'perfect British accent'. Even I would say it's perfect. Problem is, no one speaks like that... except the Germans. It also goes with grammatical accuracy as well. If any German, or Nordic etc, says "With whom were you speaking" it marks them as a foreigner instantly.

bafe3• 3 years ago

There's something slightly irritating about German or Dutch people trying very hard to have that perfect British accent. I can't really tell why, but it always seems affected and pretentious. I much prefer the "wooden" (Holzern in German) accent of the Swiss

lynguist• 3 years ago

It’s not grammatical accuracy on their part, it’s the opposite, it’s a calque, a word by word translation from their native tongue.

If it was actually perfect grammatical accuracy on their part they’d be saying “Who were you talking to” or “Who were you speaking to”.

Correct is what the people say, not the opinion of literal singular English language teachers.

lottin5• 3 years ago

There's no such thing as a 'perfect' accent. Do you mean a standard accent?

pm215• 3 years ago

RP itself has changed over time, as the wp article notes -- if you tried to speak RP of the 1950s you would definitely come across rather strangely today. Some of the arguments over naming the article mentions is I think a disagreement over whether RP should only refer to that upper class style of speech (and thus be a relatively rare accent today) or if it should be used as a name for what some people would label "Standard Southern British".

gerdesj3• 3 years ago

A great example of this is Sir David Attenborough. "Planet Earth III" has some excerpts from programmes he made when we all lived in greyscale and you can hear how his accent has changed quite noticeably through time.

tboughen• 3 years ago

Yes and no. I used to have a regional accent that was a soft mix of Lancashire and Yorkshire accents. I now work in south Worcestershire, and the local accent is pretty much modern RP. In adulthood, I softened my accent further towards RP to such an extent that people think I’m local.

What you are probably referring to is the ‘educated European twang’ that often remains when people are targeting the RP accent from 50 years ago.

dgroshev2• 3 years ago

"Estuary English" is the closest to the "default" there is today. RP is coded posh, Estuary is "vaguely from around London" without any particular colouring.

ibdf• 3 years ago

Ha... this works better than I thought it would... maybe I will finally be able to pronounce "Squirrel"... but probably not.

stephen_g• 3 years ago

Interesting idea. I quite like in terms of the theory behind pronunciation Geoff Lindsay’s YouTube channel [1]. He does a similar thing featuring snippets demonstrating certain ideas - I’ve often wondered how he finds them, perhaps using something like this!

1. https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/featured

readams• 3 years ago

I did a test and entered "saute." It worked, except that the first 5 videos were all "Binging with Babish", so it was the same person pronouncing the word. Still pretty cool though, and a lot better than the SEO spammed "how to pronounce" YouTube videos.

ahmadnoid• 3 years ago

As a non native speaker I use this a lot. Not for the pronunciation but for actual examples of the word I'm looking for.

soneca• 3 years ago

I use it from time to time and it is great. It helps that it’s such an easy to remember domain

SagatPetchy• 3 years ago

This will be very helpful to me, as someone who is learning several of the supported languages.

One piece of feedback: when I choose Cantonese, all I get is Mandarin results. I assume it's because the subtitles of almost all Cantonese videos are actually written in standard Chinese (with traditional characters).

It would be pretty hard to distinguish between Mandarin and Cantonese based on subtitles alone, unless you parse the grammar of the sentences or look for Cantonese specific characters.

ceautery• 3 years ago

I'd like to see a collection of pronunciation blind-spots, where people mispronounce words in the same way. E.g., the extra "ar" syllable we put in "narrator", and Ohioans who pronounce Bellefontaine as "bell-fountain", as though it had a "u" in it somewhere.

solardev3• 3 years ago

Mmm... I think there's a danger here. The example "coup de grâce", for example, should be pronounced with the final "s" sound. Otherwise it sounds like "coup de gras", ("strike of fat" instead of "strike of mercy"). But the YouTube videos accidentally leave out the final S. Maybe it's a Britishism? I dunno.

Wiktionary calls this a "hyperforeignism", and if you just copy the YouTube videos, you'd never know the difference...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coup_de_gr%C3%A2ce

https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ngpq7m/psa...

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/coup%20de%20grace

benatkin4• 3 years ago

Usually it's for the better. The second most populous country that's located in two different continents and doesn't have more than 10% of its population on islands should not be called Turkey (I said Pavo to because I mistakenly thought it was translated like that to Spanish, and meant to emphasize that it was called Turkey which also means the bird). I also don't mind if I don't hear the word "Cocoa" much anymore (thanks Apple for retiring it - this isn't exactly retired but is partly superseded by SwiftUI and UIKit).

solardev3• 3 years ago

most populous country that's located in two continents should not be called Pavo

I don't get this reference :(

Cocoa

Co-co? Co-co-ah? What's right?

toast02• 3 years ago

The bird seems to be named after the place, so if we fix how we pronounce and spell the place, we should also fix how we pronounce and spell the bird. Although, the bird was never really from the place at all.

Underphil• 3 years ago

Possibly a Britishism, like you say. Personally I've never heard the 'S' pronounced here.

"Coo du grar"

Edit : Just remembered this scene from Kill Bill where Michael Madsen says it : https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/50fcbf85-e7ca-4d07-8242-adb15db...

solardev3• 3 years ago

Hmm, maybe it's a common mistake on both sides of the pond? Here's an article discussing the same pronunciation in American English: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/22/most-commonly-mispronounced-...

I think I just happened to learn that phrase in grade school, from a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook lol[1], while I was learning French and witnessing the horror that was "foie gras". So the "de gras" part just never made sense to me, coincidentally.

[1] It's an automatic crit against a helpless opponent (https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/3e_SRD:Helpless_Defenders). Was really useful in Neverwinter Nights when you could paralyze or sleep an enemy then have the melee guy finish 'em off :) Who said games weren't educational?!

solumos• 3 years ago

I'd love this for Spanish

Rendello2• 3 years ago

It has a bunch of languages hidden at the bottom, here's Spanish:

https://youglish.com/spanish

hammock• 3 years ago

Please dont... "YouTube voice," the narration style(s) that so many creators have picked up, is very annoying. It's worse than "newscaster voice."

Edit: This is a cool tool though

queuebert3• 3 years ago

Is that where the speaker randomly pauses between words, as if they want to check that you're still watching?

askiiart• 3 years ago

My guess is that it refers to the really "hype" voice that a lot of YouTubers use. Like Mr. Beast, and most Minecraft YouTubers (but usually not ones on Hermitcraft) (source: I've had to listen to my little brother watching Minecraft videos way too much).

modeless5• 3 years ago

I find that the videos aren't usually from "creators" but academic lectures, interviews, that sort of thing. Maybe it depends on the kinds of words you look up, though.

cabalamat2• 3 years ago

"YouTube voice," the narration style(s) that so many creators have picked up

I can't say I've ever noticed that -- do you have particular creators/videos in mind?

coolmitch• 3 years ago

small plug for a similar site, https://filmot.com, which will search for a particular word in subtitles

https://filmot.com/search/coup%20de%20gras/1?channelID=&grid... (hover a thumbnail to play)

I've personally found it very useful for japanese learning

piyh2• 3 years ago

Having built a similar website focused on channel level search, I like reading these comments, having the same data as OP and filmot, and realizing they all hit different niches.

I took the website down as "postgres is in fact not all you need", then life hit me, but I credit building it to getting me my current job.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

As a native speaker, YouGlish is invaluable if you have to do any audio recording or public speaking and want to make sure you pronounce less common names/places correctly. You can't find those in dictionaries, and Wikipedia is only sometimes helpful.

It's also super-useful when you want to use words you've only ever seen in print, without an obvious pronunciation, and the dictionary gives multiple versions without any indication of who uses which ones. YouGlish can reveal whether the difference is regional, or whether one version is more used by academics or by the layperson, etc.

Rendello2• 3 years ago

It's good too if you're learning another language, as there's 20 languages supported at the bottom of the page. I'm personally excited by the fact I can search for Canadian French specifically

paulcole• 3 years ago

Yes, this is a great tip. I use it constantly for prepping for interviewing candidates or first meetings with potential business partners. Getting somebody’s name right really starts conversations out well.

spandextwins• 3 years ago

Speak slowly and take your time. Grammar is important. Accents are acceptable.

kebsup• 3 years ago

What I've found interesting about learning pronunciation is how deliberate you can be about fixing it. A lot of people from Slavic countries tend to pronounce the "th" sound as "d" or "s", including me, but I've stopped doing that mistake literally right after an American pointed out that I do it.

williamdclt2• 3 years ago

And then hypercorrection happens, and you start saying “th” when it _was_ an “s”!

deadbeeves8• 3 years ago

Such as in?

secondcoming2• 3 years ago

It's quite common in Ireland for 'th' to sound like 'd'. It's normally people from the countryside.

chrisandchips• 3 years ago

its cool that it still works across all locales (US, UK) for words spelt differently between countries.

E.G. searching “aluminum” still got both US and UK results, even though the later writes it “aluminium”.

lfkdev• 3 years ago

I really do like this. Cool Idea!

hiccuphippo• 3 years ago

Neat. I usually use wordreference.com, but forvo.com has many more accents and some phrases.

Just today I noticed how different the US and British pronunciations of Lieutenant are. The British one has an f sound in it, somehow.

https://forvo.com/search/lieutenant/

m4633• 3 years ago

as a native english speaker, this helps with words like Schenectady too.

aimon1• 3 years ago

This is very helpful

torcete• 3 years ago

I will finally learn how to pronounce "prioritisation".

CliffStoll• 3 years ago

Fifty-five year old true story: I was dating a woman in Buffalo; we're both native speakers. She tells me to meet her at a place on "Gothee" Street, over in the Lovejoy district.

I bike over to the east side of town, and search all over for Gothee Street. No luck. Ask a few locals - nada. Spend a half hour looking; eventually give up.

Next morning, there's hell to pay. She waited an hour for me.

What happened? "It's Goethe Street, stupid," she says" "G O E T H E"

I had no idea of this super-local pronunciation -- I'd always pronounced the poet's name as "G uh - t uh"

(Similar thing happened in a town near Rochester, New York: How do you pronounce Chili, NY ? You'd better say "Chy - Ly" unless you want to sound like a stranger.)

avgcorrection• 3 years ago

But why would I want to sound like a native?

- English accent: monocle vibes

- Australian accent: Crocodile Dundee (badass but I can’t embody that)

- Standard American accent: incredible “twang” (sounds like all wovels are sent through a wah-wah pedal)

lacrimacida2• 3 years ago

If I were learning english again I’d aim for good enough pronunciation but with better diction. Plenty of native english speakers have horrible diction. When it comes to accents it’s more like something one is not aware that they posses but only notice in outsiders.

vintermann5• 3 years ago

I am aware of my accent, but getting e.g. vowel colours exactly right is just too much work for too little gain. What would be the advantage to matching a specific dialect exactly? I'm not a spy trying to pass as a native.

On rare occasions that it matters, for instance for a play or for a song where people would notice a wrong accent, I can work to get it right on those particular words. It's a lot of work, but it's still easy compared to getting to the point where you do everything without thinking.

Minor49er2• 3 years ago

Just for fun, I looked at how 20 different people pronounced MySQL. The results:

  "My Sequel": 12
  "My Ess Kyoo El": 8
  "My Squirrel": 0

I thought "My Sequel" would have something closer to 2/3rds of results rather than 1/2

bigstrat2003• 3 years ago

I'm surprised it's the majority at all. It's so weird that people insert imaginary vowels to try to pronounce it as if it were a word.

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

You save a syllable, but also the letters SQL are on the unpleasant side of pronunciation. Just like the word "askew" -- it's just not a nice mouthfeel with that particular sequence of sounds.

ufo2• 3 years ago

History plays a role here. It used to be called SEQUEL before it was renamed to SQL.

jcparkyn2• 3 years ago

I think there are two main reasons:

- Early versions of SQL were actually called SEQUEL (Structured English QUEry Language). - Sequel is just much easier to say than SQL, especially within a sentence.

woobar2• 3 years ago

But you will insert even more vowels if you pronounce it as "My Ess Kyoo El". Same with HHMMV/Humvee.

jcparkyn2• 3 years ago

To be fair, 12/20 _is_ closer to 2/3 than 1/2.

Minor49er2• 3 years ago

D'oh, nice catch

pubby• 3 years ago

I've been saying My-Skwill since I was a kid. I pronounce SQL alone as three letters though.

anadalakra10• 3 years ago

As a non-native English speaker, the "randomness" of English pronunciation has been a source of frustration for me for many years.

I realized there are two types of issues: 1. Some sounds in English don't exist in other languages and you have to learn them "from scratch". For example the "flap T" in butter. Or the particular American "r" (constrast it to the Spanish rolled r for instance). 2. Certain sounds I DID know how to make, but didn't know WHEN to make them because spelling is so unreliable. For example, a word like "color" has two "o" letters but neither of them makes an "ou" sound - in fact they make two distinct sounds. For these, I realized you just have to practice it until your mouth "remembers" how to pronounce the word differently (i.e. creates muscle memory).

Youglish is great for fine-tuning specific words.

I also recommend BoldVoice (disclaimer: I'm a cofounder). We were YC S21 and built the app to help non-native English speakers improve their pronunciation with videos from Hollywood speech coaches and instant feedback via speech recognition ML.

modeless5• 3 years ago

BoldVoice looks cool, are you planning other languages? Personally I'm learning Mandarin.

David_Axelrod2• 3 years ago

Software Engineer at Boldvoice here, also learning Mandarin. I've been told my Chinese accent is awful due in large part to misuse of tones and overemphasizing articles like 了. We'd love to build something for all languages but are focusing on just users learning english right now.

anadalakra10• 3 years ago

Thanks! For now, we're laser-focused on English since it's the language that 1 billion people are learning (as non-native speakers). But we'd love to add more languages in the future, stay tuned!

throwaway4473• 3 years ago

https://www.viki.com/categories/country/mainland-china/genre...

woobar2• 3 years ago

I can't find any pricing information on your website. Even FAQ tab labeled "Pricing" has zero info. Do I have to signup to find out?

[1] https://www.boldvoice.com/frequently-asked-questions

anadalakra10• 3 years ago

Hey, thanks for your interest in checking out the app :) Weird that you don't see the Pricing info on that page - did you tap "Pricing" at the top bar, and then tap the first question "How much does BoldVoice cost?" Either way, the app costs $150/year or $25/month (or your local equivalent). We have a free 7-day trial so you can try it before you commit.

Dfiesl3• 3 years ago

A word of note: In British English "color" is spelt "colour"

anadalakra10• 3 years ago

I'm based in the US, where it's spelled without the "u". Quite a few examples of this spelling difference - humo(u)r, behavio(u)r etc. Oh and "spelt" is "spelled". Isn't English fun! :)

Brajeshwar3• 3 years ago

One of the things UK front-end developers really hate is they have to use "color" instead of "colour" to write CSS. :-)

globular-toast3• 3 years ago

And also the two vowel sounds are the same?

technothrasher• 3 years ago

Or the particular American "r"

I'm a native English speaker and I also have trouble with the American ah.

I grew up near Boston.

anadalakra10• 3 years ago

Haha, you'd be surprised how many Bostonians we have on our app exactly for this, although we made this for ESL speakers...

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

Tried BoldVoice right now and almost immediately hit a bit of interpolation awkwardness: “Tomorrow, we’ll work on Practice your consonant skills”. Usually I wouldn’t complain about this sort of thing, but in a language learning app it seems out of place. Learners can be really trusting at the most unfortunate times. (Mozilla’s Project Fluent[1] was built to handle these situations in a localization setting, but you can probably get away with something much simpler.) Seems really slick otherwise. Now if only I could take a placement test so I could justify paying for it... But I appreciate that most—possibly literally all—of your target audience are not me.

ETA: Also I just clicked on the site logo on /frequently-asked-questions and got pointed to /old-home-2, which is a 404. I swear I don’t seek out bugs, they come to me all by themselves :)

[1] https://projectfluent.org/

anadalakra10• 3 years ago

Oops, that's literally the name of one of our lessons "Practice your consonant skills" hence the awkward string, but I see what you mean. We'll look into handling those more elegantly because I agree, for English learners everything needs to be in perfect English.

And we have a placement test -- it's in the Resources tab, under "Assessment". Lmk how it works for you!

Re: 404... don't know what you're talking about ;)

Gabriel54• 3 years ago

Or, if you are from New York / New Jersey, the correct pronunciation is 'budder'. :)

anadalakra10• 3 years ago

Yep, exactly! That's called a "flap T/D" in linguistics.

hughdbrown3• 3 years ago

As a Canadian living in the US, this is the bane of my existence. The disappearance of Ts from so many words and phrases irks me:

- bouny hunner

- innerview

- alannic ciddy

- Rocky Mounins

- haunid house

- udderly

- budder (the bagel topping)

- winner (the season)

- bidder (the taste)

- invennive

- annie-American

- bedder

- odder (the cute wadder mammal)

The inventive ways that Ts are dropped in favor of:

- Ns

- Ds

- glottal stops

- nothing at all

are legion.

I've mused about publishing a compilation of these words with dropped Ts, but it's hit-or-miss whether the other person in America who cares would buy the book.

gizajob2• 3 years ago

Try googling the English word “ghoti”

yhager2• 3 years ago

There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.

There are many English dialects, and sounds (and meanings) vary, A LOT. It's up to you whether you want to try and assimilate the local dialect of where you live right now, or you want to simply understand and be understood.

There are many non-native speakers who are extremely easy to understand, even though it is clear that English is their second (or third) language. I believe the hardest part is to learn how to make sounds that do not exist in your native language (both consonants and vowels). But the good news is that there are ways to learn that. The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.

The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound. So trying to make the sounds out of the letters will always be a frustrating endeavor, as there will never be a single rule you can follow.

bongobingo1• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_th...

I had no idea this would exist. I guess it makes sense that people would try to do something like this, but also, to my English addled brain, not much sense to expend the effort.

shiroiuma2• 3 years ago

The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.

This is only partially true: the language a person speaks affects the development of facial muscles used to make those sounds. So trying to speak a different language that uses different muscles can be very difficult. Of course, as you said, it's a matter of practice: with enough practice, you can develop those muscles, just like pumping weights in a gym.

dgroshev2• 3 years ago

The set of meaningful sounds (phonemes) is pretty conservative though. They can be rendered very differently (and that's what we call "accent" in native speakers), but it's like moving a densely connected graph around in the soundspace — yes the particular sounds might shift, but it's the relation between them that encodes meaning, and that is preserved. In that sense "English pronunciation" does exist.

pif4• 3 years ago

The English spelling is guided by meaning

As a native Italian, I'm convinced that using the Latin alphabet without embracing phonetic spelling can only be driven by idiocy ;-)

pif4• 3 years ago

There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.

Well well... as it is called English, scholars from cultural institutions rooted in England are the reference. Everybody else is free to speak their own language, but one is proper English, while the others are at most somewhere-English.

scyzoryk_xyz• 3 years ago

Practice and willingness to fail and clown around is key. As an english teacher I've always liked to bring up cross-lingual interference - you're always going to accidentally bring in sounds from your own language into the one you're learning.

I'm no linguist, but English has also drawn a lot from other neighboring languages. Understanding a bit of French, Dutch or German helps a lot with understanding which English words are pronounced in which way. It's not random is what I mean.

I once knew a EU parlament translator and linguist with 6+ languages under his belt. When he visited us in Poland he would not shut up - he tried reading every sign, every word, kept asking how it's pronounced. Just continuously played with language, like a software developer does with code. When he was leaving after a two day stay he had a lot of Polish quite well figured out, it was really impressive. But he was just really willing to fail over and over and over in all social interactions.

degrews• 3 years ago

There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.

Oh come on. The fact that there is no regulatory body doesn't mean we can't meaningfully talk about "English pronunciation" in a general way. And Spanish and German have different dialects , accents and pronunciations too.

The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound

How is the spelling guided by meaning?

hfhdjdks• 3 years ago

English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.

Spanish does have a regulatory agency (RAE) that we choose to follow, but AFAIK, they don't say anything about pronunciation. Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Colombia all have different pronunciations and not one is more official than the other. There's a certain sense of what's "normal" or nearer the center of gravity for most speakers, but I think that's true for English too (new zealand or south african English is less "standard" than a Midwestern accent or BBC English)

JonathonW• 3 years ago

Don't worry; English pronunciation can be mastered simply through tough, thorough thought.

(English "o" is tons of fun-- of the 22 vowel sounds listed on the English orthography page on Wikipedia, only two can't generally have the letter "o" involved.)

cmehdy• 3 years ago

The Chaos (1922) - http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

More than half of my life lived in English-speaking countries does not help quite enough to avoid a migraine with this one.

EliRivers• 3 years ago

Indeed.

I apologise that none of the following words rhyme; rough, cough, plough, dough, lough, hiccough.

gniv3• 3 years ago

through tough, thorough thought.

Neat example. What's also interesting is that it's hard to parse visually too, so it slows down reading.

russdill• 3 years ago

As a native English speaker, I love videos that point out all the details I never think about but must be maddening for non-native speakers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BYmA5V5Cyg

globular-toast3• 3 years ago

We get annoyed about having to learn genders of words in other languages. It's just so silly! Then you remember that millions of children pick it up every day.

Nothing in language can actually be hard. It just takes enough practice to start thinking like a native.

But note I said practice, not repetition. You have to want to do it correctly. If you have an ear for correctness you will get there.

crashmat2• 3 years ago

Native children spend thousands of hours learning language. Just because a child can do it through some of the greatest effort of their lives at that point doesn't make it easy surely?

radicalbyte2• 3 years ago

word like "color" has two "o" letters but neither of them makes an "ou" sound

That it why we spell it as "colour" in English. Americans removed the "u" from their dialect which makes a needlessly complicated language even more so.

Learning Dutch really opened my eyes as to how terrible English is as a written language. The funny thing is that it's mirrored in our law - English law is all about case law and president. We don't even have a formal written constitution.

jdhzzz• 3 years ago

It's explained in this SNL sketch "Washington's dream": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk&t=1s

loevborg• 3 years ago

What? No, it's spelled "colour" because it comes from French, not to help make pronunciation easier.

Amezarak• 3 years ago

This is completely incorrect. "Color" was spelled "color" in England throughout its history. "Colour" was a later variant that came along later and existed alongside "color" for many years. America eventually standardized on the "color" variant and the UK standardized on the "colour" variant. If you have any doubts about this, you can search on books.google.com for +"color" and look through books published in the UK to see that this is the case. For example, here is a book published in 1756 printed in London by an Irishman in which he consistently uses "color":

https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Essay_on_Waters/UWtb...

You can find many other things of interest in here, like the use of the medial s, which only died out in the mid 1800s and makes reading old texts very annoying.

It's important to remember that for centuries in English, there was no such thing as standardized spelling. You spelled it how you felt it should be spelled. This extended even to people's own names. This didn't really change until the late 1700s-1800s.

Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin "color" via the Old French "color."

goodbyesf• 3 years ago

That it why we spell it as "colour" in English.

No. That was due to french influence. Not to be more phonetic.

Americans removed the "u" from their dialect which makes a needlessly complicated language even more so.

Webster removed it to make it more phonetic. Do you pronounce color the same way as flour? Of course not. Color, harbor, favor, etc is more phonetically accurate than colour, harbour, favour, etc.

The funny thing is that it's mirrored in our law - English law is all about case law and president.

Precedent.

sershe• 3 years ago

The main issue really is that there are no rules for pronunciation. It's not as bad as reading Chinese (as far as I understand - I tried to learn for a month and gave up :)), but in the same direction going from a language like Turkish or Spanish that are mostly WYSIWYG - the glyphs in the word don't actually tell you how to pronounce it properly.

My all time favorites are the words that are literally spelled the the same but pronounced differently, for no reason - like "wind".

Or, similar but again pronounced differently - thought, through, though, tough - why are these like that? No (good) reason.

And names, too. Worcester, guess how that's pronounced? :)

anadalakra10• 3 years ago

There are some rules in English pronunciation, but there are a ton of exceptions and inconsistencies. To give you an example of a reliable rule: when a plural word ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant, the "s" is pronounced as "z" (eyes, dogs), but when it ends in an unvoiced consonant, it's pronounced as "s" (cats). Our BoldVoice, we like to teach these rules because they are quick wins for most people. Then, a lot of the hard work comes in practicing and memorizing the many, many exceptions.

David_Axelrod2• 3 years ago

Youglish is a great tool and we often hear users reference using it. It's nice to have so many examples available for a given piece of text.

What I think makes BoldVoice significantly better is the ability to get feedback on your specific utterances and have the app highlight what elements of a word might make it harder for a native English speaker to understand you. If you go the route of only using youtube/references, you're left in this gradient descent process where you're just guessing mouth movements until you get something that sounds like the reference.

ufo2• 3 years ago

It's impressive how different it feels to jump right into the middle of videos vs starting from the beginning. Wadsworth's constant in action.

atum47• 3 years ago

I've been having one on one with my colleagues every week to exercise my pronunciation and the way i form my sentences.

Other then that i used to record videos "explaining" the current project I'm working on.

It helps a lot.

gr__or• 3 years ago

While I strive to hide my German accent, and regularly attempt making my various english accents more specific, I simultaneously hold that there is glory to European English, or, probably more importantly, for example Indian English. The site would feel more progressive if it included those.

lacrimacida2• 3 years ago

Is there a reason you want to hide your accent? I love varius accents and enjoy hearing different ones as long as the pronunciation isn’t too off that I have to make a super effort to communicate. I see accents as flavor or aroma to language.

vintermann5• 3 years ago

If someone speaks in an unexpected accent, even if it's an unambiguous and internally coherent accent so that it's perfectly possible to understand it it takes a few seconds for well-meaning natives to adjust to. It does get tiresome to have to repeat yourself. You want to at least get to the level that if you talk to someone, it registers as English immediately.

unmole• 3 years ago

I simultaneously hold that there is glory to European English, or, probably more importantly, for example Indian English.

My Polish colleagues do seem to find Indian English accents easier to understand than Irish ones.

snerc• 3 years ago

This site has resolved so many debates.

raggi• 3 years ago

One I've noticed growing a gap in recent years is "attribute" which when I used to know as having different pronunciations for the verb and the noun. The links given for different English dialects demonstrate a conflicted range, in line with growth of differing use I've seen generally propagating through, primarily Youtube. Language always changes, so perhaps it doesn't matter, but it seems like things like this might contribute as much as they solve.

gerdesj3• 3 years ago

Arnold S .. ch ... war ... err big lad, ran California for a while is being interviewed by Graham Norton on BBC1 now. That's an Irish host on a chat show in the UK with the Governator, a Dame, a comedian and the host of the Repair Shop.

Their accents cover quite a lot of ground but I doubt anyone who has a reasonable grasp of English as a foreign language would have any trouble understanding them.

Koshkin• 3 years ago

Problem is, you have to have a native speaker hear you say the words (in a sentence as well as standalone), and give you a feedback. Repeatedly, until you get it "right" (to the extent possible). Otherwise you won't get anywhere - unless you are an 8 year old kid, maybe.

vintermann5• 3 years ago

It depends on what accuracy you aim for. Most of aren't spies that have to 100% pass as natives of the county. It's still nice to pronounce e.g. place names that have irregular spellings (and that's common in lots of languages besides English).

lwansbrough3• 3 years ago

Sometimes grammar can give away a non-native speaker, particularly: “Show me how it looks like.” The use of how here is hard to explain, but it’s wrong. It should be “what it looks like”. This is an instant giveaway usually.

But even native English speakers have weird ways of saying things. One grammatical error I hear a lot in people from the Appalachia region is the “needs done” construction. Always sounds bizarre. ie. “This work needs done by tomorrow.” Also the positive “anymore” construction. ie. “You see that a lot anymore” (“these days”).

Name_Chawps2• 3 years ago

If people from a region are all doing it, it's not an error, it's a dialect.

lwansbrough3• 3 years ago

On the other hand, if most people aren’t doing it, you could also say it’s both an error and a dialect.

gniv3• 3 years ago

I've never heard that usage of "anymore". Interesting, reminds me of the French word "jamais", which can mean either never or ever, depending on context.

vintermann5• 3 years ago

That last one makes some poetic sense. There are the things you don't see a loot anymore, and the things you do see a lot anymore.

whelp_24• 3 years ago

Are you sure it wasn't something more like "get the work that needs done, done by tomorrow."?

lwansbrough3• 3 years ago

“needs done” is “incorrect” grammar here.

totetsu• 3 years ago

Does anyone remember the site where you could input a text and it would find movie clips of people saying all the words ? Like a video version of a magazine type ransom note?

profsummergig• 3 years ago

What I need is an app that would rate my pronunciation against some standard, give me pointers for improvement, and then rate my improvements, and so on.

sva_• 3 years ago

https://youglish.com/pronounce/Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychw...?

Disappointed on the first result: "I'm not going to try to pronounce". It seems the subs need not match up with what is actually said.

The site is really smooth and great to use though.

edit: was trying to look up pronunciation of the hill named Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu[0], and very surprisingly got the error "Sorry...your query is too long!".

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long_place_names

honksillet• 3 years ago

I’m guessing this was done by using YouTube’s api to look at transcripts, which are time stamped. This is great. Anyone know if there is a Chinese equivalent video platform that has time stamped characters?

zyxin• 3 years ago

This very same site also supports Chinese, along with plenty of other languages! It's linked in the footer.

https://youglish.com/chinese

mattgruskin• 3 years ago

Synecdoche: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-n1vGeVIXo

defrost• 3 years ago

This topic can induce Scooten Froody. *

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo

Brajeshwar3• 3 years ago

Awesome. My kids will love this one. I signed up but I needed to have a password that is less than 20 characters, no special characters (only alpha numeric characters). I also had to prove that I'm a special robot every time I try to fix their password requirements, which they won't say until you make the mistakes. You should be able to do in about 4 tries at worst.

zephrx1111• 3 years ago

I’m not a native English speaker, but I can speak 4 languages. My previous manager always suggested me to take some English class when we had the 1:1. Once a day, I told him: I’m speaking English with you, is because I can speak English, but you can ONLY speak English.

secondcoming2• 3 years ago

I imagine he found it quite tedious that you told him that every day!

rebryk• 3 years ago

Youglish is cool!

By the way, I am building “Grammarly for video calls” - you automatically receive feedback on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary after each call.

https://getfluently.co

pezo1919• 3 years ago

I I try to type randomly without checking the prediction, I get 67-70%, if I check it, I can easily get it to 46-50%.

It is really interesting.

hota_mazi• 3 years ago

First example I looked up got it wrong.

It was "coup de grâce".

The video pronounces it "coup de grah", like many other English speaking people, whereas you need to pronounce the final "s" sound: "coup de grass".

gniv3• 3 years ago

Nice that it works in other languages too. It seems useful for finding how words/expressions are used in real conversations. I don't care much about pronunciation, but I want to find context for the (French) words I run into. I am learning French and I use a website with a similar idea: https://www.linguee.fr. It lets you search for usage of words and shows them in professionally translated context.

PS. Just realized the '...' icon on the transcript frame opens another frame with a scrolling transcript. Very neat!

alex-moon3• 3 years ago

+1 for linguee.fr which I used extensively while I was doing my DELF B2. Unimaginably useful way to learn how words are actually used, not just grammatically but in what kinds of sentences, what's the connotative value of the word, what kind of mood does it imply. I imagine Youglish is useful for this too.

Tade02• 3 years ago

I used to be able to use Google for that (at least for written speech), but results have been decreasing in quality for the past few years.

ak39• 3 years ago

Nice!

Finally: https://youglish.com/pronounce/been/english?

"Been" pronounced "bin" is slowly moving to "ben" (mostly in the US usage).

alex-moon3• 3 years ago

I think this is a brilliant idea and is no doubt useful for discovering variations in pronunciation as well. The first thing I tested it with was "mischievous" which notoriously has a correct - "MIS-chu-vus" - as well as an "incorrect" but very common pronunciation - "mis-CHEE-vee-us" - both of which are represented.

alberto_ol• 3 years ago

Previous submissions, the first one 4 years ago with 236 comments

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fyouglish.com%2F

mgaunard2• 3 years ago

s/English/American English/g

Tade02• 3 years ago

This is very useful. My biggest problem, as a non-native English speaker, is figuring out when to use a hard and when a soft "g".

Example:

https://youglish.com/pronounce/gif/english

account42• 3 years ago

This is a bad example because the pronounciation of gif is arbitrary and there is no commonly accepted correct one.

lemper• 3 years ago

I actually, without any speck of joke, want to speak english with redneck accent or texan.

example of i18n with redneck as target: https://web.archive.org/web/20120307132029/http://www.ninesy...

victorbjorklund• 3 years ago

Very nice!

ranting-moth• 3 years ago

Within the UK, you get a whole range of "randomness" (accents). Try listening to this without reading the subtitles for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQGwe2b18UA

It even causes funny problems within the UK. Even in high places like the parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA

zac23or• 3 years ago

The problem is... the English accents are endless!

I gave up on improving my understanding of English after watching a video of the Liverpool English accent... at some point the girl uses the R sound instead of the K sound. https://youtu.be/R_C4PDSfQJA?t=173

I finally accepted: There are people who have super clear pronunciation, you know. Some accents are impossible to understand immediately, but with some time you will understand. Some you will never understand!

And some media you can understand clearly, but in some cases (Nolan disciples?) the sound is so bad that native speakers don't understand! Captions are your best friends.

kaon123• 3 years ago

Looking for Tomato (recommended you do this)

US: Tomaydo UK: Toma`o AUS: Tomahto

I feel the aussies got this one right.

sbuttgereit• 3 years ago

Related, but admittedly a bit only indirectly related, I can't recommend the YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey enough.

I never thought I could be so engrossed about minute details in the spoken word, yet I don't ever find myself bored watching these videos on the quirks of English pronunciation.

Here's a recent video about how to convey differences in the English pronunciations of words such as "fit" and "feet", especially as it relates to native French speakers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNpbv7hJf6c

penguin_booze• 3 years ago

There's English, and a there's bootlegged version thereof, called American. Be mindful which one you learn.

Like, you can skejool to buy some aluminum off of the dude inside of the building. Like.

matt-attack• 3 years ago

Geez I hope that non-natives don’t use this example for courage.

https://youglish.com/pronounce/courage/english

It was the first example I clicked on and it’s clearly someone else speaking that word with her own accent.

ragazzina• 3 years ago

As a non-native, the fourth video is the weirdest one, much more different than the others, including the first. Sounds like "coureege".

grassmudhorse• 3 years ago

feedback: - I want to repeat just the word, lots of times, without waiting, so a "rapid repeat" button would be nice. - Context is good, but the player keeps going, well beyond the initial useful section. My attention span struggles with this. - I want it for Chinese!!! I would pay for this.

Great app, thanks!

udev• 3 years ago

Examples of why French is hard:

https://youglish.com/pronounce/tous/french?

https://youglish.com/pronounce/dix/french?

Still very nice tool!

Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

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