https://youglish.com/search/tuple/all ? Roughly 60 / 40 short u ('tupple') vs long u ('toople').
It's like gif (ghif) vs gif (jif)... even among native speakers it will be heavily polarized
Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
141–150 of 251 posts
Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not me. Rural was particularly bad and is a terribly difficult word for non-indo-european speakers. The video (I found this in a few words) starts RIGHT on the word (autocracy did this as well). Most of the time this doesn't happen though. I did wish it would default to a specific pronunciation too. Default to US or UK when selecting "All". Router I got UK, Aluminum I got US. Epoch I got (it says US) some weird basta…
I think you got US for “aluminum” because the US is the only country that spells it that way.
That's a fair point (force of habit). But I did get UK when I clicked UK. Interestingly when I put in "colour" or "favouritie" I get different videos than the respective pronunciations for "color" and "favorite"
Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded. I still can't tell apart the first a's in Ratte vs Rathaus, and Germans assure me they're different and the difference breaks any attempts to make puns based on the two (Rathaus=city hall, but to my ear feels like Ratte-house/haus).
Likewise, try showing a non-English speaker that "mass" and "mess" are different. Or better yet: "Luke", "look", and "luck" And for Spanish speakers there's "Jeep", "sheep" and "cheap"
Yeah but I'd still get the puns that exploit the similarity between those words.
Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
#144Wow, this seemed to work very well for all the words I typed in. I would love to try something like this for German, as it can be hard to pronounce those massive compound words they have. The one criticism that I have is that many of these videos are from ted talks or speeches by politicians. During speeches people will inflect words differently than in everyday conversation, especially politicians. I got one Theresa…
Not me. Rural was particularly bad and is a terribly difficult word for non-indo-european speakers. The video (I found this in a few words) starts RIGHT on the word (autocracy did this as well). Most of the time this doesn't happen though. I did wish it would default to a specific pronunciation too. Default to US or UK when selecting "All". Router I got UK, Aluminum I got US. Epoch I got (it says US) some weird basta…
I'm a native English speaker and "rural" is a genuinely weird word to pronounce. My pronunciation is halfway between "earl" with a leading "r" and just incoherently growling "rrrl".
Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> many of these videos are from ted talks or speeches by politicians. I think that's a plus, but it depends on your needs.
Also televangelists. They have an unusual way of enunciating. Reminds me of a road trip with my father through the US. He was listening to an evangelist on the radio and I asked him why. (He's an athiest.) He answered along the lines of "just listen to the beauty of that voice!". He felt the same way about Gospel music. Left an impression.
Long car trips are weird and lonely enough that you can listen to anyone speaking out loud and you just feel a little less lonely no matter what. I think this was the premise of Art Bell's entire career.
Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
#146If you want to learn to speak english well, watch those programs that use English properly. Blackadder. Archer. Sherlock. Even some of the marvel movies (GOTG) are very careful in how they pronounce and articulate words. Then watch every Brian Cox and Attenborough documentary. You might come out with a bit of a British accent but that is far far better than any youtube-derived accent. Better you sound like Stirling A…
So you're equating using English "properly" with British (specifically, English) English? From a linguistic point of view, you couldn't be more wrong.
No variety of any language is superior to another
Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
#147This could be a good way to build a large tagged dataset to train a neural net TTS engine.
Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
#148If you want to learn to speak english well, watch those programs that use English properly. Blackadder. Archer. Sherlock. Even some of the marvel movies (GOTG) are very careful in how they pronounce and articulate words. Then watch every Brian Cox and Attenborough documentary. You might come out with a bit of a British accent but that is far far better than any youtube-derived accent. Better you sound like Stirling A…
Agreed. I grew up watching "Yes Prime Minister" and anything Monty Python in Norway. Has served me well in Australia.
Further to this, I've also worked on my diction using a number of available resources such as https://www.audible.com.au/search?keywords=get+rid+of+your+a... .
I could never fully appropriate the Australian accent, but something more akin to British becomes non-determinate and easier on the ear (ref: how people prefer speech synthesis in a different English region to their own).
It kind of surprises me that more non-native English speakers don't do the same; I have worked with people who I've really struggled to understand. But I can't really tell them "can you please work on your accent", as much as I wish I could and I knew it would serve them well.
Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
#149Very nice tool.
I've been replaying every Whatsapp/Signal/Messenger voice message I send to listen to how I speak, and it has helped me quite a bit with enunciatng.
This will be a welcome addition to my grammartoire.
Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not me. Rural was particularly bad and is a terribly difficult word for non-indo-european speakers. The video (I found this in a few words) starts RIGHT on the word (autocracy did this as well). Most of the time this doesn't happen though. I did wish it would default to a specific pronunciation too. Default to US or UK when selecting "All". Router I got UK, Aluminum I got US. Epoch I got (it says US) some weird basta…
I think you got US for “aluminum” because the US is the only country that spells it that way.
It's "aluminum" in American English but also in Canadian English.
Canada retains UK and French-influenced spellings for quite a few other English words which America doesn't (e.g. centre & colour). But apparently North America agrees on how to spell and pronounce atomic element 13 in English.