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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

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Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#191

Post by ramblerman »

jfk13 wrote: post #168
pacomerh wrote: post #36

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

Try "February", and cringe.... > "Here are 4 tips that should help you perfect your pronunciation of 'February': > Break 'February' down into sounds: [FEB] + [YUH] + [REE] ..." Ugh!

It's interesting you didn't take the opportunity to notice it as an interesting word, that has many subtle nuances by native speakers.

But instead saw it as a reinforcement, that solely you have the exact right way to pronounce the word.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#192

Post by dghf »

bloak wrote: post #181

I'm going to rant here... I hate the way some people seem to think that a recording is a good way of explaining the pronunciation of an English word. In my (bigoted) opinion the only good way to explain the pronunciation of an English word is with a phonemic transcription into IPA. This is because even within England there are are lots of different pronunciations of the same sound. What you want (or at least I want)…

> (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.)

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.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#194

Post by philshem »

The word biopic comes from “biographical picture” and shouldn’t rhyme with myopic. I only learned this recently. But, alas, on a website for correct pronunciation...

https://youglish.com/search/Biopic/all?

Here’s forvo, for contrast:

https://forvo.com/word/biopic/

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#195

Post by playpause »

iiv wrote: post #59

Interesting. I found one problem, though. (Or is it a feature?) 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…

I agree with embracing hypercorrection (or at least, not getting upset about it), but it's also worth accepting that mispronounced loanwords can never really 'win' while the original language still exists, so there will always be a tension. 75m native French speakers will always win any argument about how to pronounce "grâce".

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#196

Post by jjeaff »

josteink wrote: post #94
jjeaff wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you from? I have noticed that U.S. west coast seems to usually say "neesh" but I almost always hear "nitch" in the mid-west and south. Not sure about east coast.

I’m from Europe, consume both US and UK English content and I’ve only ever heard one single youtuber from Wisconsin say “nitch”. That’s it. So to me it seems most mainstream, non-regional variants of English sticks to the obvious pronunciation.

There is no such thing as non-regional variants of English.

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.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#197

Post by JetSetWilly »

smcl wrote: post #185
kochikame wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're equating using English "properly" with British (specifically, English) English? From a linguistic point of view, you couldn't be more wrong. No variety of any language is superior to another

For starters one of them - Archer - is American, not British. And nobody is saying one language is better than the other, but certainly with these programs you won't pick up bad habits like using "hence why" or confusing "than" and "then" (which I see ALL the time here on HN). 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…

You are just attaching prestige to some variants of the language over others. It just so happens that variants of English spoken by professional classes in the SE of England or NE USA are more prestigious (at least for some) than variants of English in a pub in Liverpool or Glasgow, but those other variants are not "wrong" and don't have "appalling pronunciation", they just have different pronunciation.

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".

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#198

Post by barry-cotter »

trosi wrote: post #179
wonnage wrote: post #175

Apparently every English student in China learns the following exchange: How are you doing today? / I'm fine, thank you, and you? 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…

Can you elaborate a bit on why it's a weird response? What would be more appropriate? Non-native speaker here

It’s quite formal and ritualised in a language whose premier cultural exporter has been quite outwardly egalitarian since at least WWII.

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?”

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#199

Post by taejo »

andrevoget wrote: post #109
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).

As a German I can assure you that both "a" in Ratte and Rathaus sound the same. The "a" in Rathaus is just spoken a bit longer and the following "t" is hardly pronounced, whereas the "a" in Ratte is spoken very short and the "t" is pronounced strongly. I hope that helps.

I.e., they have the same quality but different quantity, and German does distinguish vowels by length, so they are different sounds in the sense that two words that otherwise sound the same can be distinguished by vowel length. "Ratten" and "raten", for a relavent example, are not homophones and nor are "Massen" and "Maßen" (German learners might be frustrated to learn that in fact these two are opposites in some contexts).

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#200

Post by taejo »

mikekchar wrote: post #174
grumdan wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two vowel lengths sound too different to me (native speaker) for this to really work. The difference is the difference between aː vs a in IPA. I'm struggling to find a similar vowel length example in English and Wikipedia only has examples with an Australian accent. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Contrastive_vowel...

Yeah, it doesn't really exist in English. I'd even argue that the Australian pronunciation doesn't change the vowel length as much as it adds a chain shift [1] (similar to the Canadian/Algonquin "ou" pronunciation). 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…

Even if it's not really a vowel length change in Australian English, I'm pretty confident it is in South African English (as spoken by me and many others). Ferry/fairy are distinguished by vowel length only.
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