[HN Gopher] Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
Author : mrzool
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-11-02 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (youglish.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (youglish.com)
| m00dy wrote:
| great service !!!
| cardanome wrote:
| The categorization of dialects is a bit disappointing.
|
| What the hell is an "Uk" accent? So a posh southern English
| accent would be the same category as a northern one? I get that
| considering nearly every city has its own dialect of English it
| would hard to offer some sensible mapping but it still feels kind
| of wrong.
|
| If I search for the word "climate" in "Uk", "Irish" or "New
| Zealand" I get the same British English video, otherwise a
| Scottish English video for US. Don't offer me that many choices
| if you are going to lump them all together anyway.
|
| Honestly they should have just offered a switch between American
| English and "British English" (the Received Pronunciation that
| many learn at school).
|
| Other than that, seems like a great idea and already working
| reasonably well.
| leoc wrote:
| There's obviously some limit to how finely you could expect
| them to separate accents, but putting rhotic Scottish and
| Ulster accents in the same category with mostly-non-rhotic
| English accents is just crassly wrong. It's about as bad as
| putting Australia and the USA in the same category.
| GoodbyeMrChips wrote:
| Heh.... UK = England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland.
|
| None of these accents sound _remotely_ alike. Back to the
| drawing board with this methinks.
|
| > So a posh southern English accent would be the same category
| as a northern one?
|
| I'm more amused that you think southern England is the posh
| part :-) Though on a more serious note, we use shorter vowel
| sounds in the north (in the north we say 'bath', southerners
| say 'baarth') which can make us harder to understand to those
| whom English isn't a first language.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Yeah, you just described the kind of "roping in" of multiple
| dialects that make me worry that trying to define
| pronunciation in English is impossible.
|
| I have friends who are Welsh, I have friends who are
| Australian, my background is Scottish, Irish, and Estuary
| English.
|
| You learn very quickly that everyone has completely different
| ways of saying things and that you have to accept it. I can't
| imagine trying to define all of them, it's utter chaos.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Outside of mass media there isn't very strong
| standardization of pronunciation. Linguistics is a
| spectrum, and occasionally society decides to totally
| upturn how they want to pronounce things, like in the Great
| Vowel Shift:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
| cardanome wrote:
| > I'm more amused that you think southern England is the posh
| part :-)
|
| Isn't that the stereotype? I thought London area is
| considered pretty posh. At least that is what I am getting
| from most popular culture. Of course both dimensions, class
| and location are partly independent but there is some
| overlap.
|
| For example, this classic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-BVgPeZR-Y (Posh family
| reacts to northern nanny | The Catherine Tate Show)
|
| > Though on a more serious note, we use shorter vowel sounds
| in the north (in the north we say 'bath', southerners say
| 'baarth') which can make us harder to understand to those
| whom English isn't a first language.
|
| Yeah, as a non native speaker I need to concentrate way more
| because it feels faster. I love the accents though, really
| fun to listen to.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Cockney and MLE (a modern multicultural London
| accent/dialect/whatever it's officially called) are non-
| posh southern England accents. See the "in popular culture"
| for examples of MLE (Eggsy from Kingsman for example).
| Working-class London accents, not posh.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
| hencq wrote:
| > Isn't that the stereotype? I thought London area is
| considered pretty posh.
|
| I think what you're getting at is Estuary English, which is
| spoken around the estuary of the river Thames. It's pretty
| close to Received Pronunciation which is sort of the
| 'standard' English as it used to be spoken on the BBC. And
| probably what most Americans would classify as a posh
| English accent or even as just 'British English'. London
| also has Cockney though, which I don't think anyone would
| say is posh.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I understood that to mean there were two dimensions: location
| and class.
|
| More often than I am comfortable with, I am told I'm very
| easy to understand. I recommend using a middle class Midlands
| / South Midlands accent when abroad.
| Koshkin wrote:
| The West Country accent is something special!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahznvtDunEw
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| From a humorous perspective, how should US pronounce "wash"
| from a Wisconsin accent (sounds like "warsh"). Or how to
| pronounce "car" or "bar" from a Boston accent. (sounds like
| "cah" and "bah") Southern's in the US say "ant/aint" instead of
| "aunt". And what about "y'all"? etc, etc...
|
| Maybe there is similarities with the varied UK accents?
| Hemospectrum wrote:
| In fact, English dialects in the British isles have _huge_
| variety compared to those in North America, by at least an
| order of magnitude. It sounds counterintuitive at first
| because the differences in land mass and population size are
| the other way around, but the actual biggest factor here is
| the amount of time that these regions have had English-
| speaking communities. Give it a few more centuries and the
| rate of local dialect differentiation will start to catch up.
| softfalcon wrote:
| I feel bad for anyone who tries to get English pronunciation
| "correct".
|
| I'm Canadian. My family is of Scottish, Irish, and English
| descent. I am painfully aware of how many dialects, exceptions to
| words, weird pronunciations, and accents affect what should be
| the same word.
|
| My wife is Russian and is fluent in English from having lived
| here in Canada since she was a child.
|
| We regularly get into arguments about how something is
| pronounced. Most of the time, we find that it's commonly said one
| way here in this part of Canada, but has 1 different
| pronunciation in a different part of Canada and 3 more
| pronunciations back in the UK or Australia.
|
| Since Canada is very multi-cultural and there are real Scottish,
| Irish, Indian, Australian, etc speakers everywhere here, who can
| say what is the right way to say a word in English?
|
| Can we really say that the word is supposed to be X when I have 5
| people in the room, all with legitimate other ways to say it that
| are true for their version of English? Who is right? Does it
| matter who is right? How much should we care about correct
| pronunciation at all? It's not even a pedantic discussion anymore
| for me, it's a legitimate and real confusion day-to-day.
|
| As an example, I went to the above linked "youglish" site and it
| gave a suggestion for "courage". Some semi-British, possibly
| Eastern US sounding person said "coo-rah-dg" but here in my part
| of Canada, I would say it as "cur-ah-dg". They sound rather
| different and in passing, you might even think I'm saying a
| different word than "courage". Both are right, but here is a
| website that will cause someone to tell me my pronunciation is
| wrong.
|
| I feel like English is too broken and disparate in its many
| acceptable spoken variations to have a site like this ever work
| without stoking further arguments.
| filereaper wrote:
| Yup, I feel this.
|
| Take for example "Regina", I've always pronouced it re-gih-na,
| how Regina Saskatchewan was pronounced on CBC and elsewhere.
|
| But here was a lady with same name of Regina who pronounced it
| re-gi-nah which I guess is more common south of the border?
| bluGill wrote:
| This is a real problem. If we don't come up with one single
| correct way to pronounce every single word, English will fork
| into multiple different languages.
|
| This has happened - English at the core is based on German (an
| old German not spoken anymore - and one we probably can't
| reconstruct), but the French and other influences over the
| years mean few can find anything in common with German (which
| has gone a different way). I could also point out
| Spanish/Italian, or Swedish/Danish. I have no doubt that you
| can find the same in Africa and Asia, but I don't know enough
| about their languages to comment.
|
| While we are at it, can we reform English spelling to make
| sense?
| hencq wrote:
| > English at the core is based on German (an old German not
| spoken anymore - and one we probably can't reconstruct)
|
| This is just plain wrong, or at the very least very
| misleading. It's true that English is at its core a Germanic
| language. As is German, but it's fairer to say that both
| languages share a common ancestor. And in fact, we can and
| have reconstructed these older ancestor languages. In fact,
| most European languages descend from Proto-Indo-European,
| which has also been reconstructed to quite some detail.
|
| I can heartily recommend this podcast[1] by the way, which
| goes into a lot more detail about this as well as the history
| of how these things got discovered.
|
| [1] - https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
| retrac wrote:
| > This is a real problem. If we don't come up with one single
| correct way to pronounce every single word, English will fork
| into multiple different languages.
|
| It is probably unpreventable. Language change occurs
| precisely because of insufficient contact/exposure, causing
| divergence, or allowing it to persist. Dialects with lots of
| bidirectional exchange tend to shift towards each other.
|
| Besides, that ship sailed. English dialects have arisen on
| multiple continents and are diverging. I speak fairly
| standard Canadian English and there some dialects I need a
| fair bit of time to acclimate to when I encounter them.
| Unless electronic media and social change pulls some wildcard
| on language acquisition (who knows?) it's quite possible that
| in a few hundred more years the gap between spoken English on
| the street in New York and London may be as wide as German
| and Dutch today.
| amatecha wrote:
| Ah yeah, as someone who has grown up on Canada's west coast,
| sometimes I see a video of someone in a certain region of
| England (for example) and I can barely understand them. It's
| supposedly the same language, but wowzers, the variation in
| accent is very broad around the world! I was watching a show
| where a woman was named "Emma" and I literally 100% thought her
| name was "Emer" because of the way they were pronouncing her
| name. I was like "huh, that's an interesting name"! haha
| Symbiote wrote:
| Emer, or Eimhear, is a an Irish name. It rhymes with lemur,
| or emer[gency].
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emer
| amatecha wrote:
| haha, yeah, no her name was in fact Emma though (it showed
| her name in text later on). It's not the first time I
| totally misunderstood a word due to pronunciation! haha
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I feel bad for anyone who tries to get English pronunciation
| "correct".
|
| Well that's the wrong way to look at it. There's not one
| objectively correct pronunciation but there are a great many
| objectively totally incorrect ones.
|
| I've got an horrible french accent when I speak english and
| it's just obviously and non-disputably wrong and bogus.
|
| My daughter, on the other hand, has been raised watching
| english-only cartoons and going since years to british colleges
| and she definitely has an accent that many would think is
| native.
|
| The goal shouldn't be to get the "correct" pronunciation: the
| goal should be to not get an incorrect one.
| [deleted]
| softfalcon wrote:
| Maybe I am looking at it the wrong way, but at least my way
| of looking at it prevents me from judging how others speak.
|
| While I admire your want to not have the "incorrect"
| pronunciation. I don't think it's necessary or even really
| all that important.
|
| Don't let great be the enemy of good and all that.
|
| I call this a win as it makes me more accepting of others
| instead of trying to be "right" like so many native English
| speakers try to be (which is incredibly obnoxious and
| elitist).
| jjeaff wrote:
| Few native English speakers have any problem with various
| different ways that some words can be pronounced. The kind of
| pronunciation projects like this are talking about is
| pronouncing it correctly enough that it can be understood.
| skibz wrote:
| I've always been curious about the North American and UK
| pronunciations of the word "solder". Why are they subtly
| different?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Whatever the reason, it probably explains "caulk" too (US
| "cawk", UK "cawlk")
|
| [EDIT: "cawk" is a better rendition of AmE. ]
| bovermyer wrote:
| As an American English speaker, I have never heard "caulk"
| pronounced "cork." It's always been "cawk" for me.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I edited it reflect your better rendition.
| Lio wrote:
| That's nothing. I have a little WTF moment _every_ time I hear
| an American pronounce the word "buoy". :P
|
| I'm sure that's reciprocated on more that a few cases too. :D
| jonatron wrote:
| This is a better idea than searching for word+" pronunciation" ,
| because of videos like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hx052Tiz9E
| enz wrote:
| This is a nice project.
| eesmith wrote:
| We use it to settle pronunciation arguments.
|
| Sometimes we find that we're both right when the word has
| multiple pronunciations. Those are the best.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Besides pronunciation, this is great for searching videos by
| audio content. I'm surprised this is not an standard youtube
| feature.
| jobigoud wrote:
| This is curated for good close captions. Youtube has an option
| for auto transcription that sometimes gives crap results and
| couldn't be used for a tool like this.
| air7 wrote:
| Does anyone know how the site searchea YouTube for videos with
| certain words? Or is it crawled?
| jobigoud wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's a hand picked list of channels that are
| known to have good closed captions and then the index is built
| on the this.
| NotEvil wrote:
| Somehow crawling captions? Maybe
| ik8s wrote:
| I feel like this would be even more helpful to me if it would
| only show me videos of people's faces while they are pronouncing
| the word, so I can see their mouth positions.
| jobigoud wrote:
| It would be very artificial. I love youglish because the words
| are in context, in the flow of speech, including liaisons with
| preceding and following words, and for more advanced uses it
| can be used not only for pronunciation but to see how a word is
| actually used in discourse.
| [deleted]
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Outstanding!
|
| But why post this as for English. It supports so many other
| languages.
|
| I'm studying Chinese and this will help.
| herpderperator wrote:
| > Your daily search quota has exceeded.
|
| > Please come back tomorrow or upgrade to one of YouGlish's
| Premium account plans.
|
| Well, that was a fun 10 minutes while it lasted... One can
| definitely have endless fun with this. It's almost like clicking
| "Random" on Wikipedia except you have to think of a word/phrase
| first. Or use Wikipedia's "Random" and input that word into
| YouGlish :D
| mattbee wrote:
| It's missing Yorkshire! I live in a farming village, you do
| occasionally hear voices like this one -
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ScELaXMCVis
| Causality1 wrote:
| I found it fascinating he appears to be a farmer yet he's
| wearing a vest and tie. Is he dressed up for the interview or
| is that normal? I can't imagine the nightmare of sweaty chafing
| I would be if I tried to do a physical job dressed like that.
| ourcat wrote:
| Nice. But I searched for 'Aluminium'. It gave me results for
| 'Aluminum' (American English).
| mseepgood wrote:
| You can choose the accent below the search field.
| dyukqu wrote:
| Still no consensus on how to pronounce "gif".
| [deleted]
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| Yes there is, it's now unanimously pronounced "gif".
| Koshkin wrote:
| Which is... how?
| bovermyer wrote:
| That's the joke. Go back and read it again.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Ah... I will go and downvote it, then.
| sdo72 wrote:
| I like this site, it helps me a lot with pronunciation especially
| someone like me that doesn't go on the TV or watch many videos.
|
| Since the day knowing this site, I found out that I had
| pronounced many words incorrectly in the past.
|
| A few things people have pointed out, we have to go through
| sorting out the accents, multiple pronunciations for the same
| word, etc... But this is very good for the basic pronunciation
| search.
| chagaif wrote:
| I've been using this for more than a year now, it's amazing!
| abd-nh wrote:
| I came across YouGlish a while ago and found it really useful for
| finding interesting content in different languages.
|
| Shameless plug: I wrote an add-on to use YouGlish with Anki.
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/38866997
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| This is really cool. As a native speaker it's not really relevant
| for me but impressed nonetheless. Excellent site, I wish there
| was something equivalent for Mandarin or German.
|
| Tried this one off the bat -
| https://youglish.com/pronounce/elucidation/english?
| yorwba wrote:
| You can switch the language in the "YouGlish for English"
| header (or by modifying the URL).
| soneca wrote:
| At the moment I see a few comments criticizing the mixed results
| in accents and pronunciations. I am a Brazilian who speaks
| English at work, so I just wanted to share my use case for
| Youglish.
|
| I go to Youglish whenever I have _no idea_ on how to pronounce a
| word. I read English much more than I listen to English (HN
| contributes to that), so it is not uncommon to find such words. I
| don't need (nor want) to find the right accent to emulate or
| reach the perfect pronunciation to pass for a native speaker. I
| just want to be able to pronounce in a way that my coworkers will
| understand which word I am using.
|
| My coworkers are kind and reasonable, so they don't expect
| perfect pronunciation from me either, they just want to
| understand the words that are coming out of my mouth.
|
| So, for me, it is not relevant at all that the accents might be
| mixed. As long as I learn _a_ way to pronounce it, no matter
| _which_ way. Youglish is a great resource for me.
|
| (another is Grammarly, I stil don't know why they don't direct
| they marketing to non-native English speakers more, as it is
| perfect for us)
| lottin wrote:
| I use a pronunciation dictionary for that.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Brazilian here: what really helped me was learning to use the
| pronunciation part of the dictionary + listen on google.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Second that. Especially Grammarly does an amazing job. Also the
| possibility to use different styles.
|
| Another tip from me: Deepl.com
|
| Way better than Babelfish. Best translator tool there is in my
| point of view.
| mrzool wrote:
| Deepl is amazing. I use it several times a day for
| translating fairly complex sentences, idioms and figures of
| speech, usually from English (my second language) to German
| (my third language and the one I currently work with). Every
| time I'm amazed by how well it works. It really makes my life
| a lot easier.
|
| Another language tool I love and use daily is
| https://www.powerthesaurus.org
| [deleted]
| 28uwedj wrote:
| Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth.
| https://youtu.be/0Rl9Cxc7uZA?t=24
| lamontcg wrote:
| I'm certain that I've looked up Brazilian footballers names on
| youtube to see how to pronounce them correctly
| (English/American announcers don't always get them right).
| bobthechef wrote:
| Check out these bad pronunciations:
|
| - succinct
|
| - mischievous
|
| - coup de grace
|
| - comptroller
| flerovium wrote:
| What's wrong with the pronunciation of "succinct"? Most are
| suh-sinked. I'm a native speaker. That's how you say it.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Lol fuck English pronunciation. We don't have to sound like
| Californian Valley douchebags anymore.
|
| English is an international language. It no longer belongs to the
| oppressor. Don't sell out your culture. German accented
| English=sex.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| agreed. i try to make my accent as neutral as possible, but at
| the same time, as long as people can understand me... why
| bother?
|
| if someone speaks my native language with an accent, i wouldn't
| give a single fuck, but for some reason, every english speak
| must have a Californian accent.
| buserror wrote:
| I love that "coup de grace" is listed in the examples, as it's
| actually... French!
|
| Reminds me of the famous (fictional?) quote of Bush president
| saying "There is no french word for entrepreneur !" :-)
| enz wrote:
| As a French native speaker, listening to "coup de grace" as
| pronounced in English seems a bit weird ahah
| lucb1e wrote:
| As a Dutch speaker, germanic not romanic language, the
| pronunciation of coup de grace sounds weird to me as well.
| What's even weirder is an English speaker trying to repeat my
| name after me!
| ksenzee wrote:
| English is my first language, I also speak French, and I often
| avoid saying French phrases out loud in English, for fear of
| pronouncing them "wrong" and sounding pretentious.
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20225093 - June 2019 (236
| comments)
| eastendguy wrote:
| Anything like this for Chinese?
| eastendguy wrote:
| Ah, it supports many languages - great!
| loxias wrote:
| I just saw that it did and yelled out with glee. Now I just
| gotta tie this to google translate, some earbuds, a hand
| control for my pocket, and software glue and confuse the HECK
| out of my (native Chinese speaking) partner.
| zepearl wrote:
| Nice :)
|
| So, router seems to be pronounced with "UK" selected as "rooter",
| with "US" selected as "rauter".
| Symbiote wrote:
| In Britain, route rhyming with boot means the path travelled.
| Rout rhyming with sprout means cutting a slot in wood etc.
|
| The same difference holds for router and router.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The rule is not hard and fast, however. Some BrE speakers
| will use "root" for "path travelled", and I've heard both BrE
| and AmE speakers describe their spinning bladed power tool as
| a "rooter".
| Imnimo wrote:
| I looked up "synecdoche" (to see if it would give me this video
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-n1vGeVIXo), and a few of the
| examples are of people saying "Schenectady" but mis-transcribed.
| I guess you can just use your judgment to filter out a few
| mistakes, so no big deal.
| 2T1Qka0rEiPr wrote:
| I love it! Though the results for "buoy" were mixed! (British guy
| catering presumably to intl/US audience pronouncing it
| incorrectly :D)
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(page generated 2021-11-02 23:01 UTC)