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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

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Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#171

Post by anadalakra »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #160
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…

Tried BoldVoice right now and almost immediately hit a bit of interpolation awkwardness: “Tomorrow, we’ll work on Practice your consonant skills”. Usually I wouldn’t complain about this sort of thing, but in a language learning app it seems out of place. Learners can be really trusting at the most unfortunate times. (Mozilla’s Project Fluent[1] was built to handle these situations in a localization setting, but you c…

Oops, that's literally the name of one of our lessons "Practice your consonant skills" hence the awkward string, but I see what you mean. We'll look into handling those more elegantly because I agree, for English learners everything needs to be in perfect English.

And we have a placement test -- it's in the Resources tab, under "Assessment". Lmk how it works for you!

Re: 404... don't know what you're talking about ;)

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#172

Post by lwansbrough »

Sometimes grammar can give away a non-native speaker, particularly: “Show me how it looks like.” The use of how here is hard to explain, but it’s wrong. It should be “what it looks like”. This is an instant giveaway usually.

But even native English speakers have weird ways of saying things. One grammatical error I hear a lot in people from the Appalachia region is the “needs done” construction. Always sounds bizarre. ie. “This work needs done by tomorrow.” Also the positive “anymore” construction. ie. “You see that a lot anymore” (“these days”).

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#174

Post by skykooler »

David_Axelrod wrote: post #130
modeless wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also interested if you ever expand to Mandarin!

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#175

Post by benatkin »

toast0 wrote: post #151
benatkin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually it's for the better. The second most populous country that's located in two different continents and doesn't have more than 10% of its population on islands should not be called Turkey (I said Pavo to because I mistakenly thought it was translated like that to Spanish, and meant to emphasize that it was called Turkey which also means the bird). I also don't mind if I don't hear the word "Cocoa" much anymore (…

The bird seems to be named after the place, so if we fix how we pronounce and spell the place, we should also fix how we pronounce and spell the bird. Although, the bird was never really from the place at all.

It seems Erdogan doesn't want us to, but maybe the people of Turkey want us to at this point. It's not clear whether most like the name change. https://www.quora.com/What-do-Turkish-people-think-about-the... I guess I'm going to keep calling it Turkey.

Edit: looking at Google Maps in English, maybe I hope this will be reversed. This seems to be UN sanctioned bullying by a dictator. Türkiye looks weird in English a way I wouldn't be proud of. There are plenty of other countries where english speakers don't call them the same thing they call themselves. I wasn't aware until your comment that the bird was named after the country, that changes it for me, along with Google Maps putting the dots on the ü on it when it doesn't do that for other countries.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#176

Post by skykooler »

ninkendo wrote: post #134
lynguist wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Hence Churchill's response to said contingent that "This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put."

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#177

Post by skykooler »

stratom wrote: post #31
blankton wrote: post #8

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 :)

It even found one occurence of an Austrian slang pronounciation of "Eichhörnchen": "Oachkatzl" Though, in the video it is wrongly claimed that "Oachkatzlschwoaf" would mean squirrel, but in fact it means tail of a squirrel (Eichhörnchenschwanz).

Which I've only encountered as the name of a Trackmania map.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#178

Post by yafbum »

gerdesj wrote: post #131
yafbum wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the English speaking world, high tolerance for accents does seem to be the norm. My experience is that there are also countries outside of it with a much stronger normative accent seen as the "right" way to speak the language.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#179

Post by kwk1 »

ozzmotik wrote: post #41
teach wrote: 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…

don't forget the manchaca (now menchaca as it should have been the whole time!) being said as "man-CHAK". that or the one from the other major city, good ol kuykendahl aka "kir-KEN-doll"

The Pedernales River: PUR-də-NAL-iss

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#180

Post by gizajob »

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…

Try googling the English word “ghoti”
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