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Comment by looperhacks | Hacker News Reader

Maybe for american English, but put an accent in there, or even just British English and it goes down, fast. I'm currently watching Taskmaster on YouTube and every time it's not crystal clear audio with no background noice, it's closer to 50% miss

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For English I only notice it miss technical words, confusing them for more common words. Regardless of accent.

For Russian, which I don't understand, the result is maybe 50% intelligible (particularly when technical jargon is probably involved). But 50% is still infinitely better than what I can do with Russian myself (0%).

50% intelligible is not infinitely better than 0% intelligible. In fact it could be that you're completely misled into believing something that's not true at all. Whereas if you are aware you understand 0% you're not jumping to these wild conclusions as confidently.

For context, I'm watching videos of a guy making jet engines in his garage. The consequence of being mislead is about zero. I'm not concerned about the 50% I miss. There are no wild conclusions being jumped to. If anybody jumps to any sort of wild conclusions on the basis of a 50% intelligible video, that's squarely on them.

Unless the unintelligible 50% happen to align to appear intelligible... but wrongly:)

Idk, my English is not great but apparently I am better than YouTube subs because when I need help understanding an English word it turns out YT can't transcribe it either :/

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