Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation | Hacker News Reader

Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

youglish.com

210 pointsmrzool109 comments

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)

Brazilian here: what really helped me was learning to use the pronunciation part of the dictionary + listen on google.

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.

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

Random unsolicited recommendation - if you want something grammerly-ish for German https://rechtschreibpruefung24.de is a decent linter :)

I use a pronunciation dictionary for that.

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).

Thanks for sharing that story. Very cool.

you seem to know this website, just out of curiousity, how long has this been existing?

I don’t know, I learned about it the last time someone shared it here on HN (dang posted the link somewhere in this thread)

When I was doing undergraduate Engineering in India, There were several students who didn't have English as their main language in school and so struggled a bit with the course text as it was not only in English but mostly by Western authors. English movies were one of the main source for improving the language skills for them, I remember one playing Harry Potter movies on loop every single day in the dorm room. Almost all of them are having a great career in a Western country now.

Many like them and parent use entertainment media to improve their vocabulary and other language skills, There have been couple of need-gaps[1][2] on this posted on problem validation platform with several solutions like Youglish.

[1] 'Teach me vocabulary without spending extra time' - https://needgap.com/problems/169-teach-me-vocabulary-without...

[2] 'Show meaning of words in a video' - https://needgap.com/problems/201-show-meaning-of-words-in-a-...

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.

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?

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.

American English dialects trace back to the various British groups that settled the different colonies. Tangier Island[1] for example has an ancient Cornish dialect. Ocracoke Island[2] has what is probably the closest thing to a living Elizabethan English speech community. Those are extreme examples, but the stereotypical New England and Southeastern dialects have similar origins, they're just considerably watered down due to the lack of isolation.

Meanwhile, the standard "BBC English" Received Pronunciation is actually quite the novelty, comparatively speaking.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180206-the-tiny-us-isla...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-th...

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

> 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.

> London also has Cockney though, which I don't think anyone would say is posh.

Oi, guv, you sayin' East Enders geezers don't speak nice, ye? You havin' a laff, mate?

... Cockney would make me laugh so much, if it weren't for the fact that "certain people" tend to make it thicker when they want to glass you.

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.

The West Country accent is something special!

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

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.

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.

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.

> every english speak must have a Californian accent.

No they don't! And don't trust anyone who says otherwise.

If you want to improve your English for the ears of native speakers, it's vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary, grammar, and vocabulary.

Agree. At least in Europe we have, I believe, what I like to call "European English" accent: it's a mix of American English (because Hollywood + Netflix) plus British English (because that's was is taught in schools) plus your local accent (German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.). We all understand each other very well (even when we make mistakes, because we usually make the same mistakes). It's funny because whenever a native English speaker joins the conversation, some of us may have trouble understanding him.

Pidgin:)

More than accent, in Europe you can hear odd word choices and sentence structure, because people internally translate from their native languages. "Take it careful when crossing the step" - what does this mean? You can also hear "that has sense" instead of "makes sense", or "looks a good idea" instead of "sounds like a good idea".

With this site we can choose to sound like Irish douchebags instead if we want to. That's what I'd pick if I were the Brazilian OP and why? Just cause. Why not.

It would be a funny idiosyncrasy for the Brazilian guy to sound Irish to the American co-workers for example.

Fun fact - Lenin, yes that Lenin, spoke English with a distinctly Irish accent, as he learned it in Dublin.

I agree wholeheartedly with the above sentiments that the idea of "a correct pronunciation" is a toxic colonialist hangover. It's bad enough that we're losing diversity of languages around the world, let's not stamp down on diversity within the de facto world language that is replacing so many of them. Unique spins on world Englishes are the remaining traces of what was lost.

As a native English speaker, I find the SoCal Valley accent to be actively repulsive.

If someone learning our language is irrationally determined to remove their natural (and in many cases quite attractive) accent, there's so many better choices. The 100% neutral of the midwest, or the genteel and calming North Carolina. :)

If I were to learn English as a second language, and wanted to pick an accent, the early 20th century "Mid-Atlantic" would be my choice. (and yes, I know it's entirely fake)

It all boils down to the availability of the learning material. Where can I find large body of midwestern audio (or video) if I'm outside the country?

Wish people with other accents could say that.

I have seen on multiple occasions, e.g., someone from France struggling to churn out a single fucking intelligible English word out of their mouth - “ooo, what a sexy accent!!”

An Indian speaking impeccable English while being perfectly intelligible but with the distinct Indian accent - “ughh, you’ve a funny accent”. Behind the backs that ughh often becomes yikes.

There some accents that just sound better though. California, the south and definitely the British. West African English is pretty nice too. So is Jamaican patois.

One past thread:

Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20225093 - June 2019 (236 comments)

Besides pronunciation, this is great for searching videos by audio content. I'm surprised this is not an standard youtube feature.

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.

I tried searching for "Let's go Brandon" to see if it would return any funny results. But it only found "Brandon". A little disappointed.

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 !" :-)

As a French native speaker, listening to "coup de grâce" as pronounced in English seems a bit weird ahah

As a Dutch speaker, germanic not romanic language, the pronunciation of coup de grâce sounds weird to me as well. What's even weirder is an English speaker trying to repeat my name after me!

I'll never understand why the "ce" is not pronounced, while OTOH in many cases silent letters in French are pronounced in the English equivalent...

especially since the english pronunciation, as listened by a french speaking person, means literally "hit with fat", bringing to mind someone fishing off a creature by slapping it with a large piece of pork belly :-)

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.

Yeah, the Brits have bastardized so many French words (e.g. garage).

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.

> 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

This is a better idea than searching for word+" pronunciation" , because of videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hx052Tiz9E

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.

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.

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.

The pronunciation of "pronunciation" is with "nun" not "noun", unlike "pronounce".

But "correct" pronunciation is community-based: that's where language came from and that's where it remains. The only way for there to be a correct pronunciation is if people name it "Correct Pronunciation".

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

Outstanding!

But why post this as for English. It supports so many other languages.

I'm studying Chinese and this will help.

Still no consensus on how to pronounce "gif".

Yes there is, it's now unanimously pronounced "gif".

Which is... how?

That's the joke. Go back and read it again.

Ah... I will go and downvote it, then.

GIF; /ɡɪf/ GHIF or /dʒɪf/ JIF

From wikipedia

I've pronounced it "hiff" since I started learning Spanish.

Obligatory Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1AL2EMvVy0

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?

You can switch the language in the "YouGlish for English" header (or by modifying the URL).

Nice :)

So, router seems to be pronounced with "UK" selected as "rooter", with "US" selected as "rauter".

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.

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".

Maybe writing "router and router" wasn't very clear. Those are "rout-er" and "route-r".

As far as I know (and I'm British), for path travelled or a device directing those paths, all BrE speakers rhyme route and router with hoot and hooter.

The power tool, the older manual tool, and the slots they cut, are more obscure. Rout and router should rhyme with shout and shouter in BrE, but I would expect mistakes or guesses for this router.

With shoot/shout, boot/bout, loot/lout, scoot/scout, snoot/snout, toot/tout, in BrE a path travelled should be a root. But there's also brute/flute/jute/lute etc, which could be better written broot/floot/joot/loot, leaving the -ute for words like mute, tribute, minute (small), repute.

But I won't try and fix English in a HN comment.

That's nice to remember - thank you :)

I just found out that you can search "covfefe" on this. It's not even on most dictionaries!

I was about to write that "one downside of this is that you can only search a word that can be speech recognized"... then I've seen this which kinda blew my mind.

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

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.

People used to dress up more, possibly because they lived in colder environments.

This said - it's probably just a TV thing here.

(this is from a 35 year-old Emmy-winning documentary series called The Story Of English - all online at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36)

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.

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?

> 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.

> 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/

You are correct.

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

Emer, or Eimhear, is a an Irish name. It rhymes with lemur, or emer[gency].

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

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

> 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.

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).

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?

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.

I love it! Though the results for "buoy" were mixed! (British guy catering presumably to intl/US audience pronouncing it incorrectly :D)

I've always been curious about the North American and UK pronunciations of the word "solder". Why are they subtly different?

Whatever the reason, it probably explains "caulk" too (US "cawk", UK "cawlk")

[EDIT: "cawk" is a better rendition of AmE. ]

As an American English speaker, I have never heard "caulk" pronounced "cork." It's always been "cawk" for me.

I edited it reflect your better rendition.

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

Nice. But I searched for 'Aluminium'. It gave me results for 'Aluminum' (American English).

You can choose the accent below the search field.

Does anyone know how the site searchea YouTube for videos with certain words? Or is it crawled?

Somehow crawling captions? Maybe

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.

Anything like this for Chinese?

Ah, it supports many languages - great!

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.

I've been using this for more than a year now, it's amazing!

This is a nice project.

Check out these bad pronunciations:

- succinct

- mischievous

- coup de grace

- comptroller

What's wrong with the pronunciation of "succinct"? Most are suh-sinked. I'm a native speaker. That's how you say it.

great service !!!

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.

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