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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

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Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#321

Post by I_complete_me »

hughdbrown wrote: post #184
Gabriel54 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, if you are from New York / New Jersey, the correct pronunciation is 'budder'. :)

As a Canadian living in the US, this is the bane of my existence. The disappearance of Ts from so many words and phrases irks me: - bouny hunner - innerview - alannic ciddy - Rocky Mounins - haunid house - udderly - budder (the bagel topping) - winner (the season) - bidder (the taste) - invennive - annie-American - bedder - odder (the cute wadder mammal) The inventive ways that Ts are dropped in favor of: - Ns - Ds -…

Did you forget ann ar?dic - for Antarctic. What is that ?d sound? WHY is that sound?

Oh and eeeand. The word and used to be monosyllabic.

I bet there are a list of words where the loss of each of the 26 letters can be lamented. For example (off the top of my head), the a in head, the b in dumb, the first c in necklace, the d in handsaw ...

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#322

Post by deadbeeves »

williamdclt wrote: post #273
deadbeeves wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as in?

> Such as in? Any word really, for example "smooth" can get hypercorrected to "thmooth". French people with a decent english tend to fall prey to hypercorrection, see for example Macron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ03xCX6Tdg

Ah, my bad. I thought you were saying there were words where the "th" digraph stands for an "s" sound.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#323

Post by tarkin2 »

ehnto wrote: post #164
bafe wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something slightly irritating about German or Dutch people trying very hard to have that perfect British accent. I can't really tell why, but it always seems affected and pretentious. I much prefer the "wooden" (Holzern in German) accent of the Swiss

Your opinion is common in language learning it seems, as most people praise a perfect accent but some get very offended by it. I couldn't tell you why, maybe it's a feeling of lack of authenticity? I find it impressive when someone has acquired a good accent personally since it's quite difficult to do.

I'm impressed but it's weird to compliment a non Brit on their perfect British accent when they don't sound like you, a British person...

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#324

Post by hfhdjdks »

yhager wrote: post #190
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…

There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have. There are many English dialects, and sounds (and meanings) vary, A LOT. It's up to you whether you want to try and assimilate the local dialect of where you live right now, or you want to simply understand and be understood. There are many non-native speakers who are extremely easy to understand, ev…

>English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.

Spanish does have a regulatory agency (RAE) that we choose to follow, but AFAIK, they don't say anything about pronunciation. Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Colombia all have different pronunciations and not one is more official than the other. There's a certain sense of what's "normal" or nearer the center of gravity for most speakers, but I think that's true for English too (new zealand or south african English is less "standard" than a Midwestern accent or BBC English)

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#325

Post by throwaway447 »

modeless wrote: post #309
throwaway447 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, I am not sure you will still read this. Viki has changed: https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/articles/17924295071251-Su... What a clusterfuck. This may be a better option now: https://www.iq.com/

Oh bummer, what was it like?

Difficult to explain. As far as I remember it always showed the CN subtitles and you could with your mouse always see the translation and the meaning of the single characters.

viki and iq are around 5 USD a months so it could still be worth it.

This plug in is supposed to work well with Netflix: https://www.languagereactor.com/

Netflix is 12 USD or something. I am just out of prison and I have zero money and currently this is out of my reach. But it may work well for you.

BTW, try this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7180392/

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#326

Post by pja »

thfuran wrote: post #299
cmehdy wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chaos (1922) - http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html More than half of my life lived in English-speaking countries does not help quite enough to avoid a migraine with this one.

>Made has not the sound of bade Doesn't it though?

I think you might argue that the a in bade is stressed whereas the a in made is unstressed?

Otherwise I agree, there’s no difference between the two in my dialect.

Wiktionary suggests that it can be a homophone with bad in some dialects though, so perhaps that’s what the author was thinking of?

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#327

Post by shiroiuma »

vintermann wrote: post #249
renewiltord wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I notice English speakers have a tendency to assume final e's are silent.

There's a good reason for that: in English, a trailing e tends to be silent, but also to indicate that the previous vowel is different (long vs. short usually).

So, to an English speaker, "lupe" looks like LOOP, which is different from "lup" which would be LUPP. Those aren't real words of course, so some similar words with this effect might be "flute", "lute", and "glute". "flut" and "lut" aren't words AFAIK (but "flutter" is), but "glut" definitely is, and has the short-u vowel sound as opposed to the long-u that "glute" has.

The pronunciation rules in English aren't very good and are full of exceptions, but speakers are still just trying to apply the rules they know, based on other words they know, to foreign names.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#328

Post by ochrist »

lmm wrote: post #192
idoubtit wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fun hoax that was invented 70 years ago, in 1953. It was debunked at least 20 years ago, but it's still more popular than facts. There is a Tarpenhow place in the UK, but it has no hill. So Tarpenhow hill does not exist . No mention of Norse either in the Oxford Concise Dictionary which describes the word as "Torr pen", top of the hill, from the Welsh "pen", and Old English "hoh", ridge.

I don't see any contradiction between saying something comes from "old english" and saying it comes from norse.

Old English was mostly Anglo-Saxon. Old Norse was mixed in later, and after the Norman invasion it became Middle English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English Also, read this interesting theory: https://partner.sciencenorway.no/forskningno-history-languag...

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#329

Post by globular-toast »

crashmat wrote: post #296
globular-toast wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get annoyed about having to learn genders of words in other languages. It's just so silly! Then you remember that millions of children pick it up every day. Nothing in language can actually be hard. It just takes enough practice to start thinking like a native. But note I said practice, not repetition. You have to want to do it correctly. If you have an ear for correctness you will get there.

Native children spend thousands of hours learning language. Just because a child can do it through some of the greatest effort of their lives at that point doesn't make it easy surely?

I definitely didn't mean to say learning languages as an adult is easy because children do it. I've always thought methods like Rosetta Stone are complete crap because, as you say, we don't have thousands of hours to put into this like children do.

But what we do have is the most powerful tool we know for learning: language! Adults use their already acquired language to make learning a new language easier.

What I really meant, though, is there's nothing fundamentally "hard" about most things in everyday language. Being "hard" is quite hard (heh) to define but some things are intuitively hard, for example, playing Stravinsky's Petrouchka is always going to be considered a remarkable achievement for a piano player. But natural languages aren't like this. They are almost by definition easy because they are natural. If it was hard people would figure out an easier way to talk.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#330

Post by whelp_24 »

lwansbrough wrote: post #172

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.…

Are you sure it wasn't something more like "get the work that needs done, done by tomorrow."?
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