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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

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Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.

I think that's their point. I think the proper (Spanish) pronunciation is gwah-dah-loo-peh.

Isn't that the same? I mean for a native English speaker. Both seem good aproximations (from a native Spanish speaker pov).

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#22
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's their point. I think the proper (Spanish) pronunciation is gwah-dah-loo-peh.

Isn't that the same? I mean for a native English speaker. Both seem good aproximations (from a native Spanish speaker pov).

Loop vs Lu-peh. One has two syllables on the ending and the other has one. Surely that sounds noticeable different.

Not saying it's right or wrong, but the two are different.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#24
Very nice idea and great execution. Sometimes it includes clips where the generated subtitles are wrong and the word is actually a different one with similar pronunciation (German heiß -> heißt for a lot of this). Which brings to mind an interesting bias where it leaves out any examples that the AI transcription didn't recognise as the word, thus presenting only the "canonical" pronunciation according to whatever process trained the AI and potentially propagating AI artifacts into the speech of actual humans.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#27
post #10
post #3

This is really interesting! Instead of "here's how you are SUPPOSED to pronounce" any given word or phrase, you show how a bunch of native English speakers actually pronounce it. Maybe everyone is wrong, but if your goal is to be understood then you'd be better mimicking what they do than just being technically correct. :) For example, there's a street in the city I live in spelled "Guadalupe". Natives pretty much un…

That's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.

I did not know it was a river in Spain, coming from the US I had always assumed it was some catholic religious phrase or a mispronunciation of a native word.

It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP" but I guess its not even that bad compared to many mispronunciations

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#28

This is beautiful. Beyond pronunciation, I want to know how to use words in a sentence. (I play a lot of Scrabble and constantly looking up words I don't know to try incorporate them in my daily speech, this will help a lot)

Wiktionary will go into exhaustive detail (perhaps too much detail) about all the use cases of a word, including example sentences: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronunciation

Works great for Chinese and Japanese, too.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#29
post #10
post #3

This is really interesting! Instead of "here's how you are SUPPOSED to pronounce" any given word or phrase, you show how a bunch of native English speakers actually pronounce it. Maybe everyone is wrong, but if your goal is to be understood then you'd be better mimicking what they do than just being technically correct. :) For example, there's a street in the city I live in spelled "Guadalupe". Natives pretty much un…

That's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.

There is an island in the French carribean called "Guadeloupe" which is pronunced the same. Don't know if these are related too.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#30
post #3

This is really interesting! Instead of "here's how you are SUPPOSED to pronounce" any given word or phrase, you show how a bunch of native English speakers actually pronounce it. Maybe everyone is wrong, but if your goal is to be understood then you'd be better mimicking what they do than just being technically correct. :) For example, there's a street in the city I live in spelled "Guadalupe". Natives pretty much un…

That's similar to the technique I sometime use when I hesitate between two spellings or expressions. I do a Google search of both, the one with the most results wins. There is a website called Googlefight that does that for you, but it doesn't seem to work anymore.

It may not be correct by the book (though it usually is), but it is what people use.

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