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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

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Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#231

Post by justnotworthit »

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…

When you get inconsistent answers, there might be a deeper reason.

Banal was pronounced like anal, but people got embarassed sometime in the 20th century and started starting saying canal. I like anal.

Variations of indefatigable and preternatural are probably from people who have read it but never heard it pronounced (a. The funny/common example is hyperbole/hyperbolic. It's the stress that is most butchered, which cascades into vowels being pronounced differently. Heurstics in this matter can be internalized and improved.

Niche is one possible outcome of anglicization, which is complex and has different results, mostly depending on how common the word ends up. The more foreign-like (French) is neesh. The more anglicized is nich. Neither are worthy of ridicule (which usually comes from the ignorant, and is another topic altogether). Just avoid mixing the two: Never "neech" (like Nietchze) or "nish", which will make me laugh.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#232

Post by smcl »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #230
smcl wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well the whole point of this is that someone was suggesting examples of good English, someone balked at the idea that British English should be considered "proper" and I suggested that this wasn't the intended point point and added that even supposedly highly regarded accents of British English might not be considered proper by someone from that same country. I don't think it's helpful in this context to shrug your shoulders and say that English is evolving so there's no good or bad examples of pronunciation.

As to why these sound wrong to me, I'm from an area that is looked down on accent-wise and is sort of the subject of ridicule (usually just for fun). Since I moved abroad and mix in pretty multi-cultural circles I've seen first-hand what non-native-English speakers have trouble understanding when they talk to an English-native speaker, and I've often reflected on what caused this. One thing that surprised me was how easily my fellow Scots have been understood and how much difficulty people had understanding the English, since I was always led to believe that we are the ones who talk incorrectly. And it was this that made me realise how their pronunciation can stray far from the supposedly correct one - I gave a couple of examples to demonstrate this. There are plenty more if you listen carefully. The "how do you pronounce..." part of the NY Times British & Irish accent quiz was really quite good at illustrating this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/britis... (door/poor, farm/palm, horse/hoarse from there are nice examples).

So yeh sure, nothing is "wrong" in English and all that - there's no central authority that should dictate this. But when it comes to accents and clarity not all is as it might seem at first blush.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#233

Post by mkl »

noxToken wrote: post #221
mkl wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I see. In all the British-derived non-rhotic accents I'm familiar with, the second "r" sounds basically the same as the first.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#234

Post by dspig »

jjeaff wrote: post #62
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>It is from French after all. And yet the British say "filet" with a hard 't'? I have never heard anything but the French pronunciation in the US.

It's hard to say "filleted" with the french pronunciation.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#235

Post by naniwaduni »

dspig wrote: post #234
jjeaff wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is from French after all. And yet the British say "filet" with a hard 't'? I have never heard anything but the French pronunciation in the US.

It's hard to say "filleted" with the french pronunciation.

it's like being skinned with an epenthetic vowel

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#236

Post by 2038AD »

interfixus wrote: post #169
TomMckenny wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

By ' non-English speaker ' do you mean ' someone with English as a second language ', ' someone not speaking English ', or ' someone not from England '? I'm a non-native English speaker, and certainly has no problem distinguishing between your examples; in fact I use such words as illustration when explaining subtleties of Danish pronunciation to anglophones. And I absolutely cringe whenever '2' is used for 'to', og…

When I was a kid I found it confusing people would confuse there, their and they're – or rather being taught that people confuse them. I'm not sure whether it was due to me being more literate than verbal or not but "they're" at least has always been distinct to me. Maybe it's due to accent changes. I used to pronounce bull and ball the same.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#237

Post by 2038AD »

jonfriese33 wrote: post #58
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It is from French after all. This is funny to me because I often see people on the internet mentioning how strange it is that Americans leave off the 'h' when pronouncing 'herb'.

To add to the irony, I have a British accent which often drops (initial) Hs but I cringe whenever I hear 'erbal'.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#239

Post by interfixus »

2038AD wrote: post #236
interfixus wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By ' non-English speaker ' do you mean ' someone with English as a second language ', ' someone not speaking English ', or ' someone not from England '? I'm a non-native English speaker, and certainly has no problem distinguishing between your examples; in fact I use such words as illustration when explaining subtleties of Danish pronunciation to anglophones. And I absolutely cringe whenever '2' is used for 'to', og…

When I was a kid I found it confusing people would confuse there, their and they're – or rather being taught that people confuse them. I'm not sure whether it was due to me being more literate than verbal or not but "they're" at least has always been distinct to me. Maybe it's due to accent changes. I used to pronounce bull and ball the same.

Bewilders me too. Each has a distinct intonation. Also, the rules aren't really that hard to master.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#240

Post by plannedplans »

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).

This one is interesting to me because I can hear (and speak) the difference but it's something I would have never thought of on my own. I think, that the difference here isn't in the vowel `-a-` but more on how the first syllable `rat-(/ratt-)` is stressed in Ratte vs Rathaus.

Bare in mind I'm not a Linguist, but my take on this is that the word Ratte just flows out of my mouth under one breath. The second syllable is is made without needing to "stop my voice" if that makes sense… I just move my tongue up to the top of my mouth to make a small `-t-` sound. Ratte is pronounced very quick.

Rathaus, on the other hand, there is a something like a full stop (but not really a full and total silence) in between `Rat-` and `-Haus`. And for whatever reason, it seems like I pronounce the `-a-` in Rathaus longer than I do in Ratte.

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