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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

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Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#131

Post by ggggtez »

noja wrote: post #85
selune wrote: post #11

I always used forvo.com for this kind of thing. 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.

Is the American pronunciation of "communal" correct there? https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_usa/

Nope, the other one is right: https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_other/

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#132

Post by learnstats2 »

overthemoon wrote: post #39

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…

see also: "clique"

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.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#133

Post by yorwba »

gustavorg wrote: post #130
SilasX wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. I still can't tell apart the first a's in Ratte vs Rathaus, and Germans assure me they're different and the difference breaks any attempts to make puns based on the two (Rathaus=city hall, but to my ear feels like Ratte-house/haus).

Sounds the same to me. https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...

Try setting the source language to German instead of English. https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=de&t...

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#134

Post by godelski »

jalgos_eminator wrote: post #5

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…

Not me. Rural was particularly bad and is a terribly difficult word for non-indo-european speakers. The video (I found this in a few words) starts RIGHT on the word (autocracy did this as well). Most of the time this doesn't happen though. I did wish it would default to a specific pronunciation too. Default to US or UK when selecting "All". Router I got UK, Aluminum I got US. Epoch I got (it says US) some weird bastardization of US and UK[0] (though with ML becoming really popular it seems that everyone is defaulting to the UK pronunciation - probably because the spelling - so maybe this should default to UK?).

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

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#135

Post by TomMckenny »

SilasX wrote: post #102
jalgos_eminator wrote: post #5

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…

Seconded. I still can't tell apart the first a's in Ratte vs Rathaus, and Germans assure me they're different and the difference breaks any attempts to make puns based on the two (Rathaus=city hall, but to my ear feels like Ratte-house/haus).

Likewise, try showing a non-English speaker that "mass" and "mess" are different.

Or better yet: "Luke", "look", and "luck"

And for Spanish speakers there's "Jeep", "sheep" and "cheap"

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#136

Post by godelski »

noja wrote: post #85
selune wrote: post #11

I always used forvo.com for this kind of thing. 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.

Is the American pronunciation of "communal" correct there? https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_usa/

Try rural and epoch

(vs https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rural and https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epoch)

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#139

Post by dorkwood »

godelski wrote: post #134
jalgos_eminator wrote: post #5

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…

Not me. Rural was particularly bad and is a terribly difficult word for non-indo-european speakers. The video (I found this in a few words) starts RIGHT on the word (autocracy did this as well). Most of the time this doesn't happen though. I did wish it would default to a specific pronunciation too. Default to US or UK when selecting "All". Router I got UK, Aluminum I got US. Epoch I got (it says US) some weird basta…

I think you got US for “aluminum” because the US is the only country that spells it that way.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#140

Post by godelski »

MRD85 wrote: post #54

I'm not actually sure how I feel about this. Australian English is distinct, and one of its key features is heavy use of shortened words and dropped letters. For example, the word "going" becomes "goin".

My intuition (and complete guess) is that ML is pretty far away from distinguishing slang words. Maybe it can understand it, at least to some extent, but categorizing it by country (well you really even need region) is harder.
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