31–40 of 341 posts
A great project. I tried searching for the german word "Eichhörnchen" and the third pronounciation was in swiss german. That is a different language. Use with caution :)
Though, in the video it is wrongly claimed that "Oachkatzlschwoaf" would mean squirrel, but in fact it means tail of a squirrel (Eichhörnchenschwanz).
I like it in concept, though!
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…
The real correct answer to anyone's "what's the right way to say...?" question is a probability distribution.
I guess it leverages LLMs to do semantic search on YouTube audio dataset?
Pro tip: Use YouTube to learn the pronunciation of non-English words, too! Hors d'oeuvres: https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM Châteauneuf-du-Pape: https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E Laphroaig: https://youtu.be/UdE20EFNDUs
Are these jokes? It's not at all the french pronunciation of these. As in: it's so wrong a native french speaker won't even have a clue what you're trying to say (it's so off base it's totally impossible).
Try to pronounce "pneu" (tire) in french, that's good one:
(and that's the real, proper, correct, pronunciation of "pneu" in french)
I took the name "Regina" as an example as its pronounced very differently between Canada/UK and US.
If you toggle through the site's region selectors it does indeed produce videos with the regionally correct pronouciation. (Admittedly I had a sample size of N=1 video each)
So yeah, its a great start!
Those are user contributed pronunciations, so there was an effort to say the word clearly. Although Youglish might be more authentic in a sense, I prefer hearing a word enunciated precisely if I want to learn the pronunciation. And I want to hear it in isolation, at least the first time, rather than in the middle of long sentence.
Poor pronunciation (I.e. thick accent) but good grammar is usually more forgiven by a native than great pronunciation but poor grammar. Because then you sound more native, but you sound a bit… mentally slow.
I am in the latter camp. My Mandarin Chinese accent is really quite good. But I sound like a child.
So my suggestion to all learning a new language: keep a bit of your accent and heavily index on correct grammar and vocab and listening skills.