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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

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Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#131

Post by gerdesj »

yafbum wrote: post #69
shijie wrote: post #38

Something I’ve learned as someone with high proficiency in another language that I learned in adulthood (I would never say fluent, maybe “functionally” fluent): 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…

Related things I've learned after moving to US: - If your accent is not noticable, people will assume you have native-like fluency, speak fast and use colloquialisms that you may have trouble understanding. Try to work on comprehension at least as much as accent. - Everyone in the English-speaking world has an accent anyways. Californians don't speak like Texans, English don't speak like Scottish, there are people th…

All countries/languages have multiple accents. My mother was from Devon (and the forties!) and could make herself nigh on unintelligible to me and my brother and I lived in Plymouth (Devon) for eight years.

You are probably familiar with the generic south west of England accent - "aarr me hearties" and all that fake pirate bollocks. Now listen to the greatest Cockney who ever lived - Dick van Dyke - "Cor blimey Mary Poppins. Very different accents. If you drift up north, why not take a detour via Wales - several accents, quite noticeable when put side by side. The midlands has the Black country "yam yam" and Brummie, go east and there is a whole host of the bloody things. Carry on up and you got "eee bah gum" - Yorkshire and more - bear in mind that Yorkshire alone has a larger population than each of the other nations of the UK and is rather more diverse than even many Yorkies think. Lancs, Mancs and Cheshire, oh and don't forget Liverpudlean (find a recording of the Beatles speaking - they are from Liverpool). Nip on up through Geordie land and Cumbria (Cumbric has only recently died out as another Brythonic language). The Borders, where England and Scotland blur somewhat and the it gets a bit tartan flavoured.

Scotland manages to deploy a lot of accents for roughly 5.5M people. Glasgow and Edinburgh are distinguishable for me and they are only about 50 miles apart. There's Aberdeeeeeen and Perrrrrth and many more!

Over in Ireland (the island) there are several accents. The Dublin "brogue" is considered the easiest accent for a foreigner to understand, which is quite ironic. The Republic of Ireland is home to multiple accents as is Northern Ireland (UK).

The accent that D van D deploys in Mary Poppins is generally known as "Mockney" and that pirate thing is a variety of "Mummerset". Mummer is an old word for actor and Somerset is in the south west of England. This comment is getting lengthy, so I won't delve into Cockney rhyming slang, which is worth looking up if you fancy a right larf, me old septic 8)

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#132

Post by ufo »

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.

History plays a role here. It used to be called SEQUEL before it was renamed to SQL.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#133

Post by anadalakra »

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.

Thanks! For now, we're laser-focused on English since it's the language that 1 billion people are learning (as non-native speakers). But we'd love to add more languages in the future, stay tuned!

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#134

Post by ninkendo »

lynguist wrote: post #110
tarkin2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, I find it strange when Germans, for example, have a 'perfect British accent'. Even I would say it's perfect. Problem is, no one speaks like that... except the Germans. It also goes with grammatical accuracy as well. If any German, or Nordic etc, says "With whom were you speaking" it marks them as a foreigner instantly.

It’s not grammatical accuracy on their part, it’s the opposite, it’s a calque, a word by word translation from their native tongue. If it was actually perfect grammatical accuracy on their part they’d be saying “Who were you talking to” or “Who were you speaking to”. Correct is what the people say, not the opinion of literal singular English language teachers.

> If it was actually perfect grammatical accuracy on their part they’d be saying “Who were you talking to” or “Who were you speaking to”.

There is a sizable contingent of English speakers out there that continue to insist that it’s incorrect to end a sentence in a preposition. (I am not part of this group and it is fortunately shrinking over time.)

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#135

Post by jcparkyn »

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.

I think there are two main reasons:

- Early versions of SQL were actually called SEQUEL (Structured English QUEry Language). - Sequel is just much easier to say than SQL, especially within a sentence.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#136

Post by gerdesj »

pm215 wrote: post #95
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

RP itself has changed over time, as the wp article notes -- if you tried to speak RP of the 1950s you would definitely come across rather strangely today. Some of the arguments over naming the article mentions is I think a disagreement over whether RP should only refer to that upper class style of speech (and thus be a relatively rare accent today) or if it should be used as a name for what some people would label "S…

A great example of this is Sir David Attenborough. "Planet Earth III" has some excerpts from programmes he made when we all lived in greyscale and you can hear how his accent has changed quite noticeably through time.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#137

Post by throwaway447 »

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.

https://www.viki.com/categories/country/mainland-china/genre...

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#140

Post by deadbeeves »

praveen9920 wrote: post #105
shijie wrote: post #38

Something I’ve learned as someone with high proficiency in another language that I learned in adulthood (I would never say fluent, maybe “functionally” fluent): 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…

I will have to disagree here. I have a South Indian accent and a good grip on grammar, at least when I'm speaking, Most of the native English speakers I encountered had trouble understanding some of the words I was pronouncing even if it was within context. My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what…

I think what the GP means is that if you speak in grammatically correct sentences and are intelligible, people are less likely to complain or look down on you. I.e. that's a deliberate choice on the listener. If your pronunciation is so off that your listener can't understand you then that's something that's outside of their control; either they pretend to understand and go "uh-huh", or they have to ask you to repeat yourself.

>My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.

Nah. People get used to understand certain sequences of sounds and eventually get used to your particular accent, even if initially they had no idea what you were saying. One time I had to work with a Vietnamese woman (let's call her Anna) who said "transaction" like "trunsun" or something; definitely one syllable too few. After several months I was quite able to understand most of what she said, although occasionally I needed her teammate (Barbara) to translate for us. To restate GP's point, both Anna and Barbara spoke grammatically correct English and had definite East Asian accents, but Barbara pronounced things correctly and Anna didn't, so Barbara was easier to speak with, while when speaking with Anna I often had to ask her to repeat herself.

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