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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

youglish.com

41–50 of 251 posts

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#41

This is very cool. 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 consis…

When english results are split in engish it is usually american english vs british english (which is often also spoken in australia and india)

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'

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#43

Wow, this seemed to work very well for all the words I typed in. I would love to try something like this for German, as it can be hard to pronounce those massive compound words they have. 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…

If German listening and speaking practice is what you want, give this a try: https://eardoor.com 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.

Someone mentioned this in the past few months .. looks useful but I wish there were keyboard shortcuts ..

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#44

Wow, this seemed to work very well for all the words I typed in. I would love to try something like this for German, as it can be hard to pronounce those massive compound words they have. 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…

If German listening and speaking practice is what you want, give this a try: https://eardoor.com 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.

That site appears to violate the attribution requirements for the recordings they're using. https://tatoeba.org is mentioned in the attribution section, but the individual contributor of each audio file is not identified.

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 )

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#45

This is very cool. 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 consis…

[deleted]

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#46

hehe, I had to try the words I know are pronounced wrong. "Paella" it's pronounced paeya, not payeya. Also half the population says ecsetera instead of etcetera

Only about 1 in 8 speakers uses incorrect "excetera" pronunciation:

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.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#47

This is very cool. 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 consis…

When english results are split in engish it is usually american english vs british english (which is often also spoken in australia and india) 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 only seems to be some Americans pronounce it nitch, so maybe regional there, though I couldn't guess where or which is most common. Here in the UK essentially always neesh.

It is from French after all.

Edit: American audiobooks on the other hand seem to go 100% with nitch for some unexplainable reason.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#48
post #3

https://youglish.com/search/tuple/all ? Roughly 60 / 40 short u ('tupple') vs long u ('toople').

Is the short u 'tupple' wrong despite it's popularity because if so I've been lying to people...

You should use 'tupple' when referring to odd-length tuples, and 'toople' when referring to even-length tuples. That is obviously the only sane compromise.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#49

This is very cool. 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 consis…

Words which are derived or introduced from foreign languages (common in English) can have varying pronunciations. Some people tend to pronounce it close to how it sounds in the original language, others pronounce it with a more native English (be it American, Australian, British, etc.) accent. 'Croissant' 'Chic' 'Bouquet' 'Renaissance' etc.

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.

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