Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
youglish.com
youglish.com
The one criticism that I have is that many of these videos are from ted talks or speeches by politicians. During speeches people will inflect words differently than in everyday conversation, especially politicians. I got one Theresa May speech and the rest were Americans.
There also seems to be a bias for Ted Talks. I definitely agree with the parent's point about how speeches are different. But I'm not sure that's necessarily bad. The intonation changes people make when in speeches/talks is one of over pronunciation rather than the under pronunciation that we do in everyday speak. This may be better for learning. Maybe both could exist though. A "proper" and "casual" one. I'd say the casual should bias towards things like videoblogers and probably twitch streamers would be a good/plentiful resource. Might want to filter some of the latter though (stick to good streamers and big things like GDQ). Sports events would also be a good one.
That being said I'm not trying to discourage this effort and honestly I really like it (and wish there was one for Chinese, is there?). English isn't easy and there are a lot of pronunciations (I picked out words that are edge cases). I have already recommended it to a friend.
Good job!
Edit: Friend (native Chinese) already knew about this (extra good job!)
[0] How it should sound https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epoch (You can now tell all your ML friends that they are saying it wrong and win that great sense of superiority. Never mind that language is what is spoken, the dictionary is always right!)
video it linked: https://youglish.com/getcid/19634402/epoch
However, I'm sure there is a name for that "there but not there" letter.
Canada retains UK and French-influenced spellings for quite a few other English words which America doesn't (e.g. centre & colour). But apparently North America agrees on how to spell and pronounce atomic element 13 in English.
Other Southerners with thicker accents would run it together like /roo'-əl/: two syllaables, schwa in the 2nd, no perceivable 2nd /r/.
There may even be a 3rd way: /rulr/ rhymes with earl.
A phone is a class of sounds (as opposed to their instances which are all unique) that can be reliably described by articulatory or acoustic features (phonetics) or by patterns found in EEG (I'm thinking of MIT's voiceless mic).
A phoneme is another type of "sound" class used in linguistics and it is arguably the more important: phonemes, as studied in the context of a particular language, is the finite set of sounds (a few dozens at most) from which you build different words in that language. Phonemes always come in pairs, since they are defined as the minimal distinctive linguistic unit that can yield a difference in meaning.
Substitute /p/ with /f/ in/fear/ and you get /pear/, i.e. another word, a difference in meaning --> thus /p/ and /f/ are phonemes.
But substitute /r/ with /rrrrr/ in /Braveheart/ and you get the same word but with a scottish accent. These do not form a phonemic pair but allophonic variations of the same phoneme (here according to different geographic areas but they can also vary according to age, social status, gender, etc ...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Contrastive_vowel...
It's one of the most difficult things to pick up when learning Japanese as well. There are lots of words that are basically homophones except for vowel length and tone. To an English speaker they tend to sound identical, but to a Japanese speaker if you get it wrong the result is unintelligible. For example "地図" (in romaji: chizu and pronounce cheezu with a short "ee") is "map" and "チーズ" (in romaji: chiizu and pronounced cheezu with a long "ee") is "cheese" (though they have the same tones... I'm struggling to think of an example with different tones as well as vowel length).
The thing that helped me the most for this was singing songs. Once you understand that there is a necessary rhythm to the words, it makes it much easier to use that rhythm in speaking. Or at least it did for me -- YMMV.
Itabashi Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itabashi_Station
Iidabashi_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iidabashi_Station
(the major difference you hear is the long ii, rather than the t/d difference)
Bare in mind I'm not a Linguist, but my take on this is that the word Ratte just flows out of my mouth under one breath. The second syllable is is made without needing to "stop my voice" if that makes sense… I just move my tongue up to the top of my mouth to make a small `-t-` sound. Ratte is pronounced very quick.
Rathaus, on the other hand, there is a something like a full stop (but not really a full and total silence) in between `Rat-` and `-Haus`. And for whatever reason, it seems like I pronounce the `-a-` in Rathaus longer than I do in Ratte.
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...
Or better yet: "Luke", "look", and "luck"
And for Spanish speakers there's "Jeep", "sheep" and "cheap"
I'm a non-native English speaker, and certainly has no problem distinguishing between your examples; in fact I use such words as illustration when explaining subtleties of Danish pronunciation to anglophones.
And I absolutely cringe whenever '2' is used for 'to', og '4' for 'for'. Just stop it, they sound nothing alike.
I'm a native english speaker, and I pronounce those the same.
Two = to = too, but "tool" sometimes nearly has 2 "o" sounds, depending. For = four, and the sound in "four" is not the same as in "foul", which is two sounds.
What's the concrete difference? Global rising or falling? Upsteps/downsteps? Pitch contours?
r/iamverysmart
it's got spaced repetition practice, plus lots of listening material and no sign up required. its free, and there's no annoying app to download.
If you don't care about the extra features, you could also just use Tatoeba's own search functionality: https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/search?query=&from=deu&to=...
Also works for languages other than German. ( https://tatoeba.org/eng/stats/sentences_by_language )
I assume this happened in the last 8 hours or so..
I think that's a plus, but it depends on your needs.
Edit: It's a "pronunciation dictionary". Ppl just record how they say words and indicate their geography. Super useful for languages like English where there are a lot of regional varieties. And you can contribute too to the dictionary of your language. :)
I'm no affiliated w/ it btw, just really love this website, have been using it for years.
(vs https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rural and https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epoch)
I looked up words that have always tripped me up, including banal, brood, indefatigable, preternatural, conch, niche. Indefatigable, banal, and conch had some conflicting ones but the "correct" one occurred enough times that I got the idea. ("Brood" probably isn't commonly mispronounced, I just got it mixed up early in life and never quite got it sorted it out. :)
The results for "niche" are consistently mixed up though, which means that word will continue to drive me insane. Neesh or nitch!? I mix it up when I use it without any rhyme or reason.
Then other words which are more native English words (even if they have Latin, Old French, Greek or proto Germanic roots) will have regional variations.
For example 'Tuna' and 'Tuner' can have their pronunciations switched in some parts of the US.
For example, pretty much across the board I hear "filet" pronounced with the 't' in British English. But Americans almost always a silent 't' like the French.
Hearing 'piano \tuna\' and '\tuner\ sandwich' sounds different. It exists.
I can't say if that is the case here, but that is what I would suspect. As a british person I have usually heard it and used it as 'neesh'
It is from French after all.
Edit: American audiobooks on the other hand seem to go 100% with nitch for some unexplainable reason.
This is funny to me because I often see people on the internet mentioning how strange it is that Americans leave off the 'h' when pronouncing 'herb'.
“Allo, allo, what ave we ere,” said the stereotypical constable.
Even the poshest Brit will put the H in herb now.
Anecdotal, but I think this is only true for French. For example, I think U.S. Americans (even those with no Latin American ethnic background) are much more likely to pronounce Spanish loanwords in a way that's closer to the original than Brits are.
If my anecdotal belief is correct, I suppose it's largely because of the very close contact between the U.K. and France on the one hand, and the U.S. and Latin America on the other.
"so please welcome Herb Kim back to stage."
And yet the British say "filet" with a hard 't'? I have never heard anything but the French pronunciation in the US.
Fillets or rounds are placed features that round off or cap interior or exterior corners or features of a part.
niche niːʃ nɪtʃ ǁ nɪtʃ — Preference poll, British English: niːʃ 95%, nɪtʃ 5%. In American English only nɪtʃ.
However, I'm American, and I anecdotally disagree that "nitch" is the only pronunciation. I exclusively use "neesh" and I regularly hear both pronunciations from other Americans.
Banal was pronounced like anal, but people got embarassed sometime in the 20th century and started starting saying canal. I like anal.
Variations of indefatigable and preternatural are probably from people who have read it but never heard it pronounced (a. The funny/common example is hyperbole/hyperbolic. It's the stress that is most butchered, which cascades into vowels being pronounced differently. Heurstics in this matter can be internalized and improved.
Niche is one possible outcome of anglicization, which is complex and has different results, mostly depending on how common the word ends up. The more foreign-like (French) is neesh. The more anglicized is nich. Neither are worthy of ridicule (which usually comes from the ignorant, and is another topic altogether). Just avoid mixing the two: Never "neech" (like Nietchze) or "nish", which will make me laugh.
I only heard the latter pronunciation fairly recently via a YouTuber, who would say "There are riches in nitches" as a mantra. At first, I put it down to a form of colloquialism and it took me a while to figure out, that he meant 'niches'.
The first four pronounce it like I think it is pronounced then the following five pronounce it as "click" (ignoring mis-subtitled cases of cliché and claque)
It doesn't seem to be consistent in either British or American pronunciations.
I was going to say I pronounce it as if it were a French word,
but realistically it's more like I pronounce it as if you were learning high school French as taught in England.
Pretty sure it comes from French, so "neesh"
I’ve literally only ever heard one person saying nitch. And he was ridiculed for it.
So yeah, for me that pronouncitation seems fairly niche.
So to me it seems most mainstream, non-regional variants of English sticks to the obvious pronunciation.
And YouTube is not going to give you a very diverse sampling of English pronunciation.
Content creators for YouTube are heavily, heavily coastal. Mostly west coast.
Two questions:
I'm guessing the site uses the YouTube API to build a database from video captions, but which videos does it pull from? All of them or a subset? Querying the word "the" yields about 12 million results which seems low to me.
Also, is there any way to prevent the site from modifying my YouTube watch history? I noticed after clicking around a few times and then going back to YouTube's home page that my recommendations had been updated based on the random videos I'd been fed. Clearly this isn't desirable behavior, but I don't know if there's any way around it. For the time being for other users, I recommend using an incognito or private window.
Oh, it very much is desirable behaviour for me, I see it as an opportunity to get out of my filter bubble and remember YouTube's content variety. Especially given that the videos here are constrained to be from the UK, having captions and hence likely not "funny viral clips" or random vlogs.
Best result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2467&v=4axGm0g-1...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Za1TlYvBc
I'm a native English speaker but this could actually be a very cool discovery tool. I typed in my own (relatively rare) last name and found cool graduations and community organization videos.
User acknowledges sole responsibility for obtaining required licenses. YOUGLISH.COM grants you permission to display, copy, distribute and download the Materials on this Site provided that: (1) both the copyright notice identified below and this permission notice appear in the Materials; (2) the use of such Materials is solely for personal, non-commercial use; and (3) the Materials are not modified in any way.
Wrong caption?
Wrong accent?
Poor sound quality.
Poor video quality.
Crude/shocking content.
I don't think any of those fit what I'm hearing for https://youglish.com/getcid/3905773/coxswain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=478&v=Td2hfdXQ5x...
Love the site, though! Great work.
All examples I listened to of "coup de grâce" pronounced it /ku də ɡrɑː/, while the "correct" way (if there is such a thing)is /ku də ɡrɑs/.
This kind of thing must come up in more examples. I'm not usually on the prescriptive side of things, but I think it's important to know the "right" way to do things, at least when you're learning a language. On the other hand, hypercorrection will probably never disappear, so why not embrace it?
"Funny" that they have a french word and a french statement as the second and third example. But maybe not and it is intentionally, 'whois' says Registrant Country is FR. In any case, very cool and works impressively AFAICS. Wonder how long it will stay up until our Google overlords sends a cease and desist
No variety of any language is superior to another
It's not even a UK vs USA thing - for me (a Scot) I notice that large parts of southern England have appalling pronunciation ("fing" vs "thing", "bovver" instead of "bother", pronouncing "r" like "w" - see how the guy on the right pronounces "presentation" as "pwesentation", and "Ryzen" like "Wyzen" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP2QkBnRqko), and that's the most populous region so much of our TV would also be no-go for English learners.
If there was a revolution and the residents of liverpool became the new ruling classes then pretty quickly that would be the "correct" variant and the queen's English would be the "appalling pronunciation".
Yes. This is about people wanting to improve their english. They have identified that their english is less than they deem acceptable. If you want to improve, you need something to aim for. So that does indeed mean putting one version over another.
The guy in the video I linked is actually an excellent example of the "professional class", and should by conventional wisdom be the kind of pronunciation you should aim for ... but you'd be entirely wrong to do so.
As to why these sound wrong to me, I'm from an area that is looked down on accent-wise and is sort of the subject of ridicule (usually just for fun). Since I moved abroad and mix in pretty multi-cultural circles I've seen first-hand what non-native-English speakers have trouble understanding when they talk to an English-native speaker, and I've often reflected on what caused this. One thing that surprised me was how easily my fellow Scots have been understood and how much difficulty people had understanding the English, since I was always led to believe that we are the ones who talk incorrectly. And it was this that made me realise how their pronunciation can stray far from the supposedly correct one - I gave a couple of examples to demonstrate this. There are plenty more if you listen carefully. The "how do you pronounce..." part of the NY Times British & Irish accent quiz was really quite good at illustrating this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/britis... (door/poor, farm/palm, horse/hoarse from there are nice examples).
So yeh sure, nothing is "wrong" in English and all that - there's no central authority that should dictate this. But when it comes to accents and clarity not all is as it might seem at first blush.
Further to this, I've also worked on my diction using a number of available resources such as https://www.audible.com.au/search?keywords=get+rid+of+your+a... .
I could never fully appropriate the Australian accent, but something more akin to British becomes non-determinate and easier on the ear (ref: how people prefer speech synthesis in a different English region to their own).
It kind of surprises me that more non-native English speakers don't do the same; I have worked with people who I've really struggled to understand. But I can't really tell them "can you please work on your accent", as much as I wish I could and I knew it would serve them well.
By watching Archer you might also perhaps, better understand when things are phrased inappropriately?
I was trying to embed an audio version of my name's pronunciation on my blog, since, most people find it hard to pronounce my name. I googled a bit to see if there is any tool that would do it and stumbled upon this lovely app. I was amazed by the idea and accuracy of this app. It works well for the use case it was designed for. Unfortunately, mine was different.
Ending = endin Surfing = surfin
In Australia "Gonna" = "Going to"
Roughly 60 / 40 short u ('tupple') vs long u ('toople').
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quintuple
In thinking about this, I realized I say short quintuple but long standalone tuple. I can probably retcon myself some reason but I don't think there is any.
(Also, a lesser consideration: there are some native speakers of English who can distinguish certain sounds in their pronunciation but cannot, or cannot easily, hear the difference between those sounds. I would guess that either they learnt to speak partly by watching people's lips or their hearing has deteriorated as they got older.)
None of the above is specific to English. If I wanted to know how a French word is pronounced I'd prefer IPA to a recording just the same, if not more so.
Admittedly not everyone loves IPA like I do (perhaps some people think it's a kind of beer). The online Oxford English Dictionary provides IPA transcriptions of both the British and American pronunciations and you can click on them to hear a recording. Perfect.
* Learning how to pronounce the sounds of English: for example, how to pronounce (standard) English /a/, which is, of course, different from (standard) German /a/.
* Learning which sounds to use in a particular word: for example, is "swap" pronounced /swap/? (It isn't, of course. In practice most of the difficulties are caused by names of people and places.)
This even happens without you realizing it.
If I really can't get a word down through pronunciation, it honestly helps to see it typed out phonetically in English.
For example, "Hygiene" is spelled the same in both english and Norwegian, but pronunciation differs.
So while in english we might say, "Hi-Gene", in Norwegian I say "Hee-gee-inne". It doesn't work for all words, especially with vowels and sounds that aren't in english.
Had I only had IPA symbols, that takes even longer because of the time it takes to learn the symbolism. I think if it were truly a better way to learn, it would be taught to new immigrants instead of the immersive adult learning that I had, which focused vocabulary on repeating sounds and lots of listening, and the very occasional visual aide to know how to shape our mouth and where to put our tongues.
Not that my pronunciation is perfect, mind you, but I'm passable even if I retain a strong English accent when I speak Norwegian. Most of the time, I'm understandable and the spouse is nice enough to point out rough spots if I slip up too much.
It may also be down to the conceptual buckets into which we place sounds when learning languages, especially our native languages. For example, many English speakers would be surprised to learn that 'p' has two distinct pronunciations in English, aspirated (as in 'pin') and unaspirated (as in 'spin'). Similarly, the 'l' at the start of 'late' is not the same as that at the end of 'wool', the so-called 'dark l' sound. (Caveat: IIRC, some varieties of English do not make the latter distinction, and I wouldn't be surprised if some don't make the former one, either.)
A couple of personal anecdotes:
- I have a friend who pronounces the word "hook" with a long "oo" sound, whereas I pronounce it with a much shorter vowel (we have very different regional accents). When I pointed this out to him, he could not at first tell the difference between our pronunciations. It was only when I compared it to the difference between "pull" and "pool" -- which he did pronounce slightly differently -- that he grudgingly acknowledged the distinction.
- A Northern Irish colleague expressed incredulity at the southern English habit of pronouncing "poor", "paw" and "pour" the same, when in his part of the world they were, to his ears, said quite differently. When he spoke those words, I could hear that difference too -- but only just, and it took concentration.
hear and repeat is pretty much how we all acquired our mother tongues. IPA is nice in the absence of a tutor, or a native speaker, but it's definitely not superior.
Forgetting the fact people need to be trained in understanding how to interpret IPA before they can even use it, it still misses some subtle inflections.
In addition to being rather small, the drop down has an awful color contrast ratio of 2.75 : 1 between the dark grey text (#7f98ad) and the light grey background (#f5f5f5)[1]. Have you considered making this page more accessible?
[1] https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.5/color-contrast
I've had trouble explaining why this is a weirdly formal response that native speakers would probably never use. So it was somewhat amusing to find zero search results for this! (not counting partial matches). It seems like the first phrases you learn in any foreign language reliably turn out to be phrases nobody actually uses.
This seems to be so common that there are even a bunch of Youtube videos out there about this topic, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_53mo10_Mbk
It’s just old fashioned. If you’re on this forum you’ve read enough English you’re unlikely to mess up but
How are you?
Great thanks. You?
Fine, fine.
It’s scripted insofar as no one cares how the other person actually is and answering I anything other than a positive fashion would be a faux pas but everything after “How are you?” is fluid. You can also go even less formal, e.g. “How’s it going?”
https://youglish.com/search/swap/all
https://youtu.be/vJSk4RR2QO4?t=313
This video comes back, and he actually says 'swat'...
https://youglish.com/search/%22et%20cetera%22/all?
Even 12% -- is far too many for my taste. But at least I can use "et cetera" pronunciation as a quick "literacy level" test.
Remember that basically every word of your language (regardless of the language) was probably at some point considered some low-class corruption of the "proper" language.
When it comes to English in particular look at the mess that's English spelling and the massive phonetic shifts it underwent during the past centuries, it seems a bit silly to single out "excetera" as the one bad pronunciation used by illiterate people.
Not in my experience. Where are you from?
> "Here are 4 tips that should help you perfect your pronunciation of 'February':
> Break 'February' down into sounds: [FEB] + [YUH] + [REE] ..."
Ugh!
But instead saw it as a reinforcement, that solely you have the exact right way to pronounce the word.
Sometimes it can be attributed to regionalisms (8-Bit Guy uses Texas-isms in addition to his usual set of mispronunciations). Sometimes it's just not paying attention, like one video game blogger who mispronounced "Imagic," showed an old Imagic TV commercial where the name was pronounced correctly, and then mispronounced "Imagic" immediately after. But some simply aren't bothering to look up the correct pronunciation of things.
/Former broadcaster, trained in pronunciation, and in correcting the pronunciation of TV news anchors.
Not exactly English, but it's in the dictionary. I don't know if I should be impressed that the first result actually sounded pretty reasonable or disappointed at how bad some of these pronunciations are.
Of course, the whole thing is gonna be "results may vary", I suppose... https://youglish.com/getcid/25032799/electrophoresis
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/raison%20d'etre
https://youglish.com/search/triskaidekaphobia/all
Every person pronounces it differently.
https://youglish.com/search/Biopic/all?
Here’s forvo, for contrast:
https://youglish.com/search/route/us
vs
My English Dictionary corresponds to what i expected, but it is different in practice it seems.
I've been replaying every Whatsapp/Signal/Messenger voice message I send to listen to how I speak, and it has helped me quite a bit with enunciatng.
This will be a welcome addition to my grammartoire.
There's a little dropdown on the right of the big "Youglish" logo.
I tried it in Italian (my native language) and it works extremely well.
I would suggest having the auto-completion for words just like Google search.
For example, try comparing UK and US pronunciation of these words:
- herbs
- route
- privacy
Search term : Aluminium
Result : American saying Aluminum
Search term : Solder
Result : American saying "sodder"
But there is only one word "solder", and in most of the US it's pronounced like "sodder" would be, if that were a word at all.
Leaving the "l" out of "solder" is just bizarre to me as a New Zealander :-)
"Sodder" was equally bizarre to me when I heard it.
next features: 1) Find the videos that most agree with eachother and 2) Add other languages
dei·tuh not da ta fai·nans not fi nance
> (Advance search)
is glaring. That should be "Advanced search" as in "click here to perform an advanced (adj) search," not as in "click here to advance (verb) [a] search," which is nonsensical.
I was not trying to suggest in my original comment that "advance" as an adjective was inherently incorrect. All I was saying was that the phrase "advance search" is meaningless.