Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation • Hacker News Board

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#121

Post by David_Axelrod » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:33 PM UTC

Youglish is a great tool and we often hear users reference using it. It's nice to have so many examples available for a given piece of text.

What I think makes BoldVoice significantly better is the ability to get feedback on your specific utterances and have the app highlight what elements of a word might make it harder for a native English speaker to understand you. If you go the route of only using youtube/references, you're left in this gradient descent process where you're just guessing mouth movements until you get something that sounds like the reference.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#122

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:38 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #117

Minor49er wrote: post #116

Just for fun, I looked at how 20 different people pronounced MySQL. The results: "My Sequel": 12 "My Ess Kyoo El": 8 "My Squirrel": 0 I thought "My Sequel" would have something closer to 2/3rds of results rather than 1/2

I'm surprised it's the majority at all. It's so weird that people insert imaginary vowels to try to pronounce it as if it were a word.

You save a syllable, but also the letters SQL are on the unpleasant side of pronunciation. Just like the word "askew" -- it's just not a nice mouthfeel with that particular sequence of sounds.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#123

Post by modeless » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:42 PM UTC

anadalakra wrote: post #119

As a non-native English speaker, the "randomness" of English pronunciation has been a source of frustration for me for many years. I realized there are two types of issues: 1. Some sounds in English don't exist in other languages and you have to learn them "from scratch". For example the "flap T" in butter. Or the particular American "r" (constrast it to the Spanish rolled r for instance). 2. Certain sounds I DID kno…

BoldVoice looks cool, are you planning other languages? Personally I'm learning Mandarin.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#124

Post by modeless » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:43 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #63

Please dont... "YouTube voice," the narration style(s) that so many creators have picked up, is very annoying. It's worse than "newscaster voice." Edit: This is a cool tool though

I find that the videos aren't usually from "creators" but academic lectures, interviews, that sort of thing. Maybe it depends on the kinds of words you look up, though.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#125

Post by deadbeeves » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:44 PM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #93

kebsup wrote: post #72

What I've found interesting about learning pronunciation is how deliberate you can be about fixing it. A lot of people from Slavic countries tend to pronounce the "th" sound as "d" or "s", including me, but I've stopped doing that mistake literally right after an American pointed out that I do it.

And then hypercorrection happens, and you start saying “th” when it _was_ an “s”!

Such as in?

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#126

Post by deadbeeves » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:45 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #25

C# and C++ devolve to just C, unfortunately. And I’m still not sure how to pronounce Azure. ;)

I believe it's supposed to be like "erasure" without the "er".

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#127

Post by jcparkyn » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:47 PM UTC

Minor49er wrote: post #116

Just for fun, I looked at how 20 different people pronounced MySQL. The results: "My Sequel": 12 "My Ess Kyoo El": 8 "My Squirrel": 0 I thought "My Sequel" would have something closer to 2/3rds of results rather than 1/2

To be fair, 12/20 _is_ closer to 2/3 than 1/2.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#128

Post by tboughen » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:48 PM UTC

smokel wrote: post #42

As a non-native speaker, I was interested in learning the perfect British accent. Turns out there is no such thing. There are many different accents, but none of them is the default. "Received pronunciation" [1] probably comes closest, but apparently it makes you sound like someone who is a non-native speaker and who tried to learn a default accent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation

Yes and no. I used to have a regional accent that was a soft mix of Lancashire and Yorkshire accents. I now work in south Worcestershire, and the local accent is pretty much modern RP. In adulthood, I softened my accent further towards RP to such an extent that people think I’m local.

What you are probably referring to is the ‘educated European twang’ that often remains when people are targeting the RP accent from 50 years ago.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#129

Post by _a_a_a_ » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:49 PM UTC

Scarblac wrote: post #106

gilleain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I jut looked up some examples from this list https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-49813249 > starting with 'Frome'. The first video hit had someone pronouncing it rhyming with 'home' when it's meant to be "Froom". Ok, so it got 'Ballachulish' from a video specifically about Scottish Gaelic. (As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?)

> As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult? Same way as every other English word - the spelling seems unrelated to the pronunciation. I've never heard this word. Is the 'gh' part pronounced as in though or as in tough?

Pronounce as follows: say "Oh mah gawd" then elide the "gawd".

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#130

Post by David_Axelrod » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 10:50 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #123

anadalakra wrote: post #119

As a non-native English speaker, the "randomness" of English pronunciation has been a source of frustration for me for many years. I realized there are two types of issues: 1. Some sounds in English don't exist in other languages and you have to learn them "from scratch". For example the "flap T" in butter. Or the particular American "r" (constrast it to the Spanish rolled r for instance). 2. Certain sounds I DID kno…

BoldVoice looks cool, are you planning other languages? Personally I'm learning Mandarin.

Software Engineer at Boldvoice here, also learning Mandarin. I've been told my Chinese accent is awful due in large part to misuse of tones and overemphasizing articles like 了. We'd love to build something for all languages but are focusing on just users learning english right now.