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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

youglish.com

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Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#241

Post by plannedplans »

grumdan wrote: post #120
SilasX wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ... can you accept "Ratten raus vom Rathaus" as a pun? Like, I can understand if it's too low-effort or obvious, but is it still a pun?

The two vowel lengths sound too different to me (native speaker) for this to really work. The difference is the difference between aː vs a in IPA. I'm struggling to find a similar vowel length example in English and Wikipedia only has examples with an Australian accent. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Contrastive_vowel...

It's not the same comparison… but what about the English words "dock" (as in a boat dock) and "talk?" The vowels in them seem subtle different enough.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#242

Post by plannedplans »

interfixus wrote: post #169
TomMckenny wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

By ' non-English speaker ' do you mean ' someone with English as a second language ', ' someone not speaking English ', or ' someone not from England '? I'm a non-native English speaker, and certainly has no problem distinguishing between your examples; in fact I use such words as illustration when explaining subtleties of Danish pronunciation to anglophones. And I absolutely cringe whenever '2' is used for 'to', og…

> And I absolutely cringe whenever '2' is used for 'to', og '4' for 'for'. Just stop it, they sound nothing alike.

r/iamverysmart

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#243

Post by Itai_ »

jeanmichelx wrote: post #118
bencoder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

British: https://youglish.com/search/herb/uk ?

Funnily enough the result I got is completely irrelevant: the sentence is "welcome her back to stage".

The sentence does make sense. Its actually:

"so please welcome Herb Kim back to stage."

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#244

Post by noxToken »

mkl wrote: post #233
noxToken wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US dialects have a big impact on the second "r". I'm not a linguist, and I'm terrible with the terminology. The proper pronunciation is to sound both /r/ in the same manner. Southern dialects probably won't, but it would be to different degree. Some Southerners would "slur" the second /r/ for something akin to /roo'-rəl/: two syllables, schwa in 2nd syllable, but the second /r/ is barely there. I don't know if there'…

I see. In all the British-derived non-rhotic accents I'm familiar with, the second "r" sounds basically the same as the first.

In terms of "correctness", the 2nd /r/ should always be there. There are so many flavors of English in the US with minor differences. Much like England, you can head 30 miles in a different direction, and you might find a group of people who speak markedly different than you.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#245

Post by sandworm101 »

sailfast wrote: post #40
sandworm101 wrote: post #14

If 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 would also recommend watching Archer and H. Jon Benjamin animated series? (Bob's Burgers) I'd certainly recommend them though I'm not sure he's a canonical example of the language. By watching Archer you might also perhaps, better understand when things are phrased inappropriately?

He isn't. The archer writers are. The Bobs Burger's writers are not. It isn't about sound or accent. It is about language. Bob will slur his words slight, and uses are much lower vocabulary. Archer does the opposite. The actor is a small part of that distinction.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#246

Post by sundarurfriend »

theLotusGambit wrote: post #19

Awesome site! This is infinitely more useful than any other pronunciation site I've seen. Two questions: I'm guessing the site uses the YouTube API to build a database from video captions, but which videos does it pull from? All of them or a subset? Querying the word "the" yields about 12 million results which seems low to me. Also, is there any way to prevent the site from modifying my YouTube watch history? I notic…

> my recommendations had been updated based on the random videos I'd been fed. Clearly this isn't desirable behavior

Oh, it very much is desirable behaviour for me, I see it as an opportunity to get out of my filter bubble and remember YouTube's content variety. Especially given that the videos here are constrained to be from the UK, having captions and hence likely not "funny viral clips" or random vlogs.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#247

Post by 333c »

learnstats2 wrote: post #132
overthemoon wrote: post #39

This is very cool. I looked up words that have always tripped me up, including banal, brood, indefatigable, preternatural, conch, niche. Indefatigable, banal, and conch had some conflicting ones but the "correct" one occurred enough times that I got the idea. ("Brood" probably isn't commonly mispronounced, I just got it mixed up early in life and never quite got it sorted it out. :) The results for "niche" are consis…

see also: "clique" The first four pronounce it like I think it is pronounced then the following five pronounce it as "click" (ignoring mis-subtitled cases of cliché and claque) It doesn't seem to be consistent in either British or American pronunciations.

How would you pronounce it? "Cleek"? I'm American and would pronounce it like "click."

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#248

Post by learnstats2 »

333c wrote: post #247
learnstats2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

see also: "clique" The first four pronounce it like I think it is pronounced then the following five pronounce it as "click" (ignoring mis-subtitled cases of cliché and claque) It doesn't seem to be consistent in either British or American pronunciations.

How would you pronounce it? "Cleek"? I'm American and would pronounce it like "click."

Yes, "cleek"

I was going to say I pronounce it as if it were a French word,

but realistically it's more like I pronounce it as if you were learning high school French as taught in England.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#249

Post by myfonj »

Google Dictionary (that one you get while querying "define word") has nice collection of record samples from native speakers (unlike Google Translate where samples are synthetized). I like to compare British and American accents. (Let's say I use two browsers with distinct language preferences.) Some US samples are performed by lady with unbelievably charming voice.

Re: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

#250

Post by bmn__ »

interfixus wrote: post #239
2038AD wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid I found it confusing people would confuse there, their and they're – or rather being taught that people confuse them. I'm not sure whether it was due to me being more literate than verbal or not but "they're" at least has always been distinct to me. Maybe it's due to accent changes. I used to pronounce bull and ball the same.

Bewilders me too. Each has a distinct intonation. Also, the rules aren't really that hard to master.

I learnt that all are pronounced the same: /ðɛː/

What's the concrete difference? Global rising or falling? Upsteps/downsteps? Pitch contours?

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