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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

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Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#221

Post by noxToken »

mkl wrote: post #208
rebuilder wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For "rural", I'd expect there to be significant differences between rhoticizing and other dialects.

I don't think so, as both "r"s are sounded (like at the start of a word in a non-rhotic accent). It's when the "r" is at the end of a sound that there's a difference: "are", "our", "letter", "arctic", "architecture", etc. (none of those "r"s are sounded in my non-rhotic New Zealand accent, edit: unless followed by a vowel sound, like "letter and").

US dialects have a big impact on the second "r". I'm not a linguist, and I'm terrible with the terminology. The proper pronunciation is to sound both /r/ in the same manner. Southern dialects probably won't, but it would be to different degree. Some Southerners would "slur" the second /r/ for something akin to /roo'-rəl/: two syllables, schwa in 2nd syllable, but the second /r/ is barely there. I don't know if there's a way to specify that in a pronunciation key. This is how I'd say it in casual conversation. I imagine that native speakers of languages without /r/ would probably miss the 2nd /r/ with this pronunciation.

Other Southerners with thicker accents would run it together like /roo'-əl/: two syllaables, schwa in the 2nd, no perceivable 2nd /r/.

There may even be a 3rd way: /rulr/ rhymes with earl.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#223

Post by taejo »

mkl wrote: post #211
taejo wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You can argue that "aluminium" and "aluminum" are two different words, each pronounced the same way in Britain as in the US, but with the former being common in Britain and rare in the US and the other vice versa. But there is only one word "solder", and in most of the US it's pronounced like "sodder" would be, if that were a word at all.

I think they're trying to say it's American-focused, rather than English-focused. A search for "aluminium" returning pronunciation for "aluminum" contradicts your idea. Leaving the "l" out of "solder" is just bizarre to me as a New Zealander :-)

Ah, that makes sense. If you want exclusively British pronunciations, you can choose that option. I think it's equally reasonable to say that "aluminum" is the US pronunciation of the single word "alumin(i)um", I was just trying to divine GGP's argument.

"Sodder" was equally bizarre to me when I heard it.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#224

Post by mlrtime »

rkuykendall-com wrote: post #219
fniephaus wrote: post #101

8 pronunciations of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in English: https://youglish.com/search/supercalifragilisticexpialidocio... Best result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2467&v=4axGm0g-1...

One clip was so intriguing, I had to go back and watch the whole thing, and it was really good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Za1TlYvBc I'm a native English speaker but this could actually be a very cool discovery tool. I typed in my own (relatively rare) last name and found cool graduations and community organization videos.

That led me on a 30 minute divergence, thanks :)

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#225

Post by GorgeRonde »

taejo wrote: post #199
andrevoget wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

A few remarks on methodology in linguistics (the science).

A phone is a class of sounds (as opposed to their instances which are all unique) that can be reliably described by articulatory or acoustic features (phonetics) or by patterns found in EEG (I'm thinking of MIT's voiceless mic).

A phoneme is another type of "sound" class used in linguistics and it is arguably the more important: phonemes, as studied in the context of a particular language, is the finite set of sounds (a few dozens at most) from which you build different words in that language. Phonemes always come in pairs, since they are defined as the minimal distinctive linguistic unit that can yield a difference in meaning.

Substitute /p/ with /f/ in/fear/ and you get /pear/, i.e. another word, a difference in meaning --> thus /p/ and /f/ are phonemes.

But substitute /r/ with /rrrrr/ in /Braveheart/ and you get the same word but with a scottish accent. These do not form a phonemic pair but allophonic variations of the same phoneme (here according to different geographic areas but they can also vary according to age, social status, gender, etc ...)

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#226

Post by smcl »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #197
smcl wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure if you read my comment right, it seems you have understood it exactly the wrong way round. I'm Scottish, saying that contrary to popular belief it is actually the south of England who make the most bizarre pronunciation choices in the UK

The guy in the video I linked is actually an excellent example of the "professional class", and should by conventional wisdom be the kind of pronunciation you should aim for ... but you'd be entirely wrong to do so.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#227

Post by allochthon »

lottin wrote: post #55
RugnirViking wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'

According to the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary it is: niche niːʃ nɪtʃ ǁ nɪtʃ — Preference poll, British English: niːʃ 95%, nɪtʃ 5%. In American English only nɪtʃ.

Hrm. American here. I always say "neesh," and I rarely hear "nitch" from other Americans. Wondering whether this is a regional thing.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#228

Post by rahuldottech »

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…

Off-topic, but looking up "/ku də ɡrɑː/" on Google now brings up this thread as one of the top results due to your comment. This comment of mine will only make it worse.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#229

Post by blacksmythe »

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…

Fun for foreigners (both in Tokyo area):

Itabashi Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itabashi_Station

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

(the major difference you hear is the long ii, rather than the t/d difference)

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#230

Post by JetSetWilly »

smcl wrote: post #226
JetSetWilly wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure if you read my comment right, it seems you have understood it exactly the wrong way round. I'm Scottish, saying that contrary to popular belief it is actually the south of England who make the most bizarre pronunciation choices in the UK The guy in the video I linked is actually an excellent example of the "professional class", and should by conventional wisdom be the kind of pronunciation you should aim…

Every word in the English language is a poorly pronounced version of some older word that preceded it. What makes some words as pronounced in the south of England bizarre or wrong?
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