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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

770 points by interweb 7y ago

mjlee 7y ago
How do you leave feedback for what is just a bad pronunciation? The options I can see are: This is not english! Wrong caption? Wrong accent? Poor sound quality. Poor video quality. Crude/shocking content. I don't think any of those fit what I'm hearing for https://youglish.com/getcid/3905773/coxswain https://youglish.com/getcid/3905773/coxswain
- hathawsh 7y ago
  I agree there's an issue; "mispronounced" should be one of the feedback options. The third video for "especially" pronounces the word as "ekspecially". https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=478&v=Td2hfdXQ5x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=478&v=Td2hfdXQ5x... Love the site, though! Great work.
- georgeam 7y ago
  I would also like to see a feedback option for wrong word (same spelling). For example I searched for "melee" meaning (close to) "chaotic fight", and one of the entries referred to a person called "MeLee". It should be possible to flag this and either automatically or manually review the entry.
- remedan 7y ago
  Maybe the idea is to be strictly descriptivist? The way people actually pronounce the word _is_ the correct way. That's why you can listen to multiple examples and see what the common pronunciation is.
Mindless2112 7y ago
https://youglish.com/search/raison%20d%27%C3%AAtre/all https://youglish.com/search/raison%20d%27%C3%AAtre/all Not exactly English, but it's in the dictionary. I don't know if I should be impressed that the first result actually sounded pretty reasonable or disappointed at how bad some of these pronunciations are. Of course, the whole thing is gonna be "results may vary", I suppose... https://youglish.com/getcid/25032799/electrophoresis https://youglish.com/getcid/25032799/electrophoresis
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  If it's in the dictionary it is English. Or do we start throwing out everything we got from Norman French too? https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/raison%20d'etre https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/raison%20d'etre
adpirz 7y ago
https://youglish.com/search/tuple/all https://youglish.com/search/tuple/all? Roughly 60 / 40 short u ('tupple') vs long u ('toople').
- umvi 7y ago
  It's like gif (ghif) vs gif (jif)... even among native speakers it will be heavily polarized
  - godelski 7y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20228480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20228480
- autoexec 7y ago
  Is the short u 'tupple' wrong despite it's popularity because if so I've been lying to people...
  - Retra 7y ago
    You should use 'tupple' when referring to odd-length tuples, and 'toople' when referring to even-length tuples. That is obviously the only sane compromise.
    - kurtisc 7y ago
      Any ideas for 'trie'?
      - pvg 7y ago
        Yes. Correctly pronounced with a Khoisan click.
  - pvg 7y ago
    It's not. Not even when used as a suffix in 'real' words. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quintuple https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quintuple In thinking about this, I realized I say short quintuple but long standalone tuple. I can probably retcon myself some reason but I don't think there is any.
sys13 7y ago
Got a message, 'you have been banned from this site'
- autoexec 7y ago
  What words were you looking for?
jalgos_eminator 7y ago
Wow, 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 May speech and the rest were Americans.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  If German listening and speaking practice is what you want, give this a try: https://eardoor.com https://eardoor.com it's got spaced repetition practice, plus lots of listening material and no sign up required. its free, and there's no annoying app to download.
  - schemathings 7y ago
    Someone mentioned this in the past few months .. looks useful but I wish there were keyboard shortcuts ..
  - yorwba 7y ago
    That site appears to violate the attribution requirements for the recordings they're using. https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org is mentioned in the attribution section, but the individual contributor of each audio file is not identified. If you don't care about the extra features, you could also just use Tatoeba's own search functionality: https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/search?query=&from=deu&to=eng&orphans=no&unapproved=no&user=&tags=&list=&has_audio=&trans_filter=limit&trans_to=und&trans_link=&trans_user=&trans_orphan=&trans_unapproved=&trans_has_audio=yes&sort=words https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/search?query=&from=deu&to=... Also works for languages other than German. ( https://tatoeba.org/eng/stats/sentences_by_language https://tatoeba.org/eng/stats/sentences_by_language )
  - avinium 7y ago
    "This site has been suspended for copyright violations." I assume this happened in the last 8 hours or so..
smacktoward 7y ago
Finally, a way to learn how to pronounce such important conversational phrases as "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" and "Google flat Earth."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ldjb 7y ago
I like that this website offers a variety of pronunciations for each word. A lot of websites people use for pronunciations will provide a single pronunciation they deem to be correct, whereas there are multiple pronunciations in actual use.
flixic 7y ago
Searching for “gif” left me even more confused than I was.
selune 7y ago
I always used forvo.com for this kind of thing. Edit: It's a "pronunciation dictionary". Ppl just record how they say words and indicate their geography. Super useful for languages like English where there are a lot of regional varieties. And you can contribute too to the dictionary of your language. :) I'm no affiliated w/ it btw, just really love this website, have been using it for years.
- noja 7y ago
  Is the American pronunciation of "communal" correct there? https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_usa/ https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_usa/
  - therein 7y ago
    Not in my experience.
  - kwoff 7y ago
    No, it doesn't even sound like an American.. while the two downvoted ones do sound "correct".
  - wyclif 7y ago
    No, this is wrong. It sounds like it's being mispronounced by a native German speaker. There is no hard initial vowel sound; the first syllable is not emphasized like that. There are three syllables in the word: com-mun-al and it's pronounced "kəˈmyo͞on(ə)l,ˈkämyənəl/" so the stress is on the second, not the first syllable.
    - jakubp 7y ago
      She does put the stress on the second syllable.
  - ggggtez 7y ago
    Nope, the other one is right: https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_other/ https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_other/
WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
This is desperately needed here in Silicon Valley...
DutchSysOps 7y ago
It sometimes work for me to learn new words :-)
sandworm101 7y ago
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 Archer than [insert random youtube person].
- sailfast 7y ago
  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?
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    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.
- groks 7y ago
  A bit of Fry and Laurie, on language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg
- kochikame 7y ago
  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
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    Not variety or accent. These shows use words carefully. They speak in exact meanings. The use a wider vocabulary and do not blur words. In fact much of their humor is based on misunderstandings rooted in pronunciation. Archer makes jokes about furriers and farriers. Blackadder about the formal name "Captain Darling" and the pet name "my darling", forcing the listener to maintain an understanding of context. These tricks aren't used on The Simpsons or the Big Bang Theory, shows largely aimed at lowest common denominators. Such differences are irrespective of accent or dialect.
333c 7y ago
I wouldn't normally point this out, but considering the site is about learning languages, the mistake on the homepage: > (Advance search) is glaring. That should be "Advanced search" as in "click here to perform an advanced (adj) search," not as in "click here to advance (verb) [a] search," which is nonsensical.
- mnw21cam 7y ago
  Okay, context makes you mostly right. But. Advance is also a adjective, as in "Advance booking", which is a booking in advance. Lots of people incorrectly write "Advanced booking" instead, which is a technologically superior booking, and probably not what they meant.
  - 333c 7y ago
    Advance as an adjective (as in advance booking) means "ahead of time," whereas advanced as an adjective (as in advanced search) means "highly developed or complex," which is what is appropriate here. I was not trying to suggest in my original comment that "advance" as an adjective was inherently incorrect. All I was saying was that the phrase "advance search" is meaningless.
theLotusGambit 7y ago
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 noticed after clicking around a few times and then going back to YouTube's home page that my recommendations had been updated based on the random videos I'd been fed. Clearly this isn't desirable behavior, but I don't know if there's any way around it. For the time being for other users, I recommend using an incognito or private window.
- gdw2 7y ago
  As a user, open the page in a private window.
- sundarurfriend 7y ago
  > 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.
autoexec 7y ago
If this works for names I'm going to try to win a 30 year old bet with "Raistlin Majere"
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
Am I the only one that uses Google Translate "listen" option for learning pronunciation of weird words?
- personlurking 7y ago
  I recommend forvo.com (like another commenter mentioned), as GT doesn't work that great for certain languages (ex. Catalan is just a robotic voice).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
polyterative 7y ago
Man I wish I had this when learning English. I want it for German
reaperducer 7y ago
I hope that some YouTube publishers start using this. It's always jarring when some tech vlogger puts up a video with blatant mispronunciations. Sometimes it can be attributed to regionalisms (8-Bit Guy uses Texas-isms in addition to his usual set of mispronunciations). Sometimes it's just not paying attention, like one video game blogger who mispronounced "Imagic," showed an old Imagic TV commercial where the name was pronounced correctly, and then mispronounced "Imagic" immediately after. But some simply aren't bothering to look up the correct pronunciation of things. /Former broadcaster, trained in pronunciation, and in correcting the pronunciation of TV news anchors.
- unixhero 7y ago
  Some other guy being so nasal he can't pronounce monsters and it comes out as bonsters.
maerF0x0 7y ago
very cool! next features: 1) Find the videos that most agree with eachother and 2) Add other languages
- bhelkey 7y ago
  The site appears to support 7 languages in the rather hard to see dropdown near the youglish logo.
Ivoirians 7y ago
I can't stop playing with this. Plugging in foreign words and locations is pretty fun, like Nouakchott, N'Djamena, Lviv, Hagia Sophia, Ibiza, Louvre, etc. Just getting the variety of organic, candid pronunciations is fascinating.
pacomerh 7y ago
damn this is very useful, congrats
pacomerh 7y ago
hehe, I had to try the words I know are pronounced wrong. "Paella" it's pronounced paeya, not payeya. Also half the population says ecsetera instead of etcetera
- dennisgorelik 7y ago
  Only about 1 in 8 speakers uses incorrect "excetera" pronunciation: https://youglish.com/search/%22et%20cetera%22/all https://youglish.com/search/%22et%20cetera%22/all? Even 12% -- is far too many for my taste. But at least I can use "et cetera" pronunciation as a quick "literacy level" test.
  - simias 7y ago
    It's an extremely common deformation I think, "excetera" is also a very common pronunciation in French. I really doubt it's heavily tied to literacy level at any level, it's probably more comfortable to pronounce. Remember that basically every word of your language (regardless of the language) was probably at some point considered some low-class corruption of the "proper" language. When it comes to English in particular look at the mess that's English spelling and the massive phonetic shifts it underwent during the past centuries, it seems a bit silly to single out "excetera" as the one bad pronunciation used by illiterate people.
    - jeanmichelx 7y ago
      > "excetera" is also a very common pronunciation in French. Not in my experience. Where are you from?
- jfk13 7y ago
  Try "February", and cringe.... > "Here are 4 tips that should help you perfect your pronunciation of 'February': > Break 'February' down into sounds: [FEB] + [YUH] + [REE] ..." Ugh!
  - ramblerman 7y ago
jonwinstanley 7y ago
Unless you want to know how to say "Notre Dame". https://youglish.com/search/notre%20dame/all https://youglish.com/search/notre%20dame/all?
- 13415 7y ago
  You can switch to French.
- hathawsh 7y ago
  If you're talking about the University of Notre Dame in Indiana USA, the most common pronunciation is /noʊtrəˈdeɪm/ or /noʊtərˈdeɪm/ (NOH-tər-DAYM). Simon Whistler's video uses both the American and French versions appropriately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhPDprqB_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhPDprqB_c
XCSme 7y ago
This is amazing, not only for learning english but also for quickly finding videos of a subject you are interested in (which is quicker than YouTube search as this is almost a "Feeling lucky" search).
- news_hacker 7y ago
  Exactly! This is amazing. I can search for esoteric words/ideas like "soulcraft" and instantly find a niche of interesting videos etc. to further my ideas. This is a gamechanger.
overthemoon 7y ago
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 consistently mixed up though, which means that word will continue to drive me insane. Neesh or nitch!? I mix it up when I use it without any rhyme or reason.
- RugnirViking 7y ago
  When english results are split in engish it is usually american english vs british english (which is often also spoken in australia and india) I can't say if that is the case here, but that is what I would suspect. As a british person I have usually heard it and used it as 'neesh'
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    It only seems to be some Americans pronounce it nitch, so maybe regional there, though I couldn't guess where or which is most common. Here in the UK essentially always neesh. It is from French after all. Edit: American audiobooks on the other hand seem to go 100% with nitch for some unexplainable reason.
    - jonfriese33 7y ago
      > It is from French after all. This is funny to me because I often see people on the internet mentioning how strange it is that Americans leave off the 'h' when pronouncing 'herb'.
      - irrational 7y ago
        Wait, some people pronounce herb with the 'h' not silent?
clarkmoody 7y ago
I wonder if language pronunciation will drift less over time, given the technology to record the spoken word and play it back at a much later day? Any linguists on HN thinking about vowel drift in the digital age?
- elliekelly 7y ago
  I also wonder if technology could have the opposite effect of expediting the adoption of “new” pronunciations only among certain demographics. It’s not linguistics (or maybe it is?) but the number of 20-something women speaking with vocal fry seems to have increased thanks to pop culture/the Kardashians.
calibas 7y ago
Here's a good one: https://youglish.com/search/triskaidekaphobia/all https://youglish.com/search/triskaidekaphobia/all Every person pronounces it differently.
- noja 7y ago
  These people pronouncing just that word pronounce it the same: https://forvo.com/word/triskaidekaphobia/#en https://forvo.com/word/triskaidekaphobia/#en
  - calibas 7y ago
    Listen again. The British one pronounces "ai" differently, and the American ones put emphasis on different syllables.
MRD85 7y ago
I'm not actually sure how I feel about this. Australian English is distinct, and one of its key features is heavy use of shortened words and dropped letters. For example, the word "going" becomes "goin".
- romseb 7y ago
  You can choose between US, UK and AUS.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  You chose an example that is ubiquitous in USA, like "gonna".
  - MRD85 7y ago
    It's not just going. It's nearly any word ending in a g. Ending = endin Surfing = surfin In Australia "Gonna" = "Going to"
    - jumelles 7y ago
      USA too.
- godelski 7y ago
  My intuition (and complete guess) is that ML is pretty far away from distinguishing slang words. Maybe it can understand it, at least to some extent, but categorizing it by country (well you really even need region) is harder.
- avinium 7y ago
  I'm Australian, and I would never recommend that someone learn English by listening to one of my countrymen. We are lazy, nasal, slurred speakers. Standard English or American are much more preferable.
iiv 7y ago
Interesting. I found one problem, though. (Or is it a feature?) All examples I listened to of "coup de grâce" pronounced it /ku də ɡrɑː/, while the "correct" way (if there is such a thing)is /ku də ɡrɑs/. This kind of thing must come up in more examples. I'm not usually on the prescriptive side of things, but I think it's important to know the "right" way to do things, at least when you're learning a language. On the other hand, hypercorrection will probably never disappear, so why not embrace it?
- sovande 7y ago
  > coup de grâce "Funny" that they have a french word and a french statement as the second and third example. But maybe not and it is intentionally, 'whois' says Registrant Country is FR. In any case, very cool and works impressively AFAICS. Wonder how long it will stay up until our Google overlords sends a cease and desist
- jedmeyers 7y ago
  “Coup de grace” caught my attention as well. It showed a speaker with a very notable RP pronouncing this phase with a very fake sounding French ‘r’ and no ‘s’ in the end, when the s sound is clearly present in the French and modern English pronunciation. Some might say that he butchered it.
- playpause 7y ago
  I agree with embracing hypercorrection (or at least, not getting upset about it), but it's also worth accepting that mispronounced loanwords can never really 'win' while the original language still exists, so there will always be a tension. 75m native French speakers will always win any argument about how to pronounce "grâce".
- rahuldottech 7y ago
  Off-topic, but looking up "/ku də ɡrɑː/" on Google now brings up this thread as one of the top results due to your comment. This comment of mine will only make it worse.
jlengrand 7y ago
Sounds cool! Funny thing : the first thing I was greeted with was "How to pronounce coup de grâce in English (1 out of 23)". Being French, I do find that a little hard to swallow :D
skynetv2 7y ago
I typed in "what is my name?" and it took me to a video of a southern preacher's sermon. lol
dave1619 7y ago
Does this site violate YouTube's terms of service for putting banner ads/advertising on the same pages as the YT embedded videos?
quadrature 7y ago
Love it, does anyone know of a similar service for chinese ?.
- sideral 7y ago
  There is Chinese in the dropdown list.
bhelkey 7y ago
Several commenters in this thread missed the language drop down. In addition to being rather small, the drop down has an awful color contrast ratio of 2.75 : 1 between the dark grey text (#7f98ad) and the light grey background (#f5f5f5)[1]. Have you considered making this page more accessible? [1] https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.5/color-contrast https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.5/color-contrast
thallavajhula 7y ago
I found out about this tool just 3 days ago and now I see it on the front page of HN. I was trying to embed an audio version of my name's pronunciation on my blog, since, most people find it hard to pronounce my name. I googled a bit to see if there is any tool that would do it and stumbled upon this lovely app. I was amazed by the idea and accuracy of this app. It works well for the use case it was designed for. Unfortunately, mine was different.
fniephaus 7y ago
8 pronunciations of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in English: https://youglish.com/search/supercalifragilisticexpialidocious/all https://youglish.com/search/supercalifragilisticexpialidocio... Best result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2467&v=4axGm0g-1-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2467&v=4axGm0g-1...
- rkuykendall-com 7y ago
  One clip was so intriguing, I had to go back and watch the whole thing, and it was really good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Za1TlYvBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Za1TlYvBc I'm a native English speaker but this could actually be a very cool discovery tool. I typed in my own (relatively rare) last name and found cool graduations and community organization videos.
  - mlrtime 7y ago
    That led me on a 30 minute divergence, thanks :)
luqa 7y ago
the website name doesn't make it obvious, but they support 7 languages. There's a little dropdown on the right of the big "Youglish" logo. I tried it in Italian (my native language) and it works extremely well.
abdusco 7y ago
Really cool site, I can see myself using this extensively for learning German. One cool "feature" is that I get to see videos on various topics that I wouldn't normally search for. Invaluable for training the ear.
OrgNet 7y ago
https://youglish.com/search/Worcestershire/all https://youglish.com/search/Worcestershire/all https://youglish.com/search/Quinoa/all https://youglish.com/search/Quinoa/all
tabtab 7y ago
I tried Youtube, but only learned to meow and play 80's song on piano.
open-source-ux 7y ago
This is really helpful even for speakers of English since there are so many ways to pronounce the same word between countries and even within a country. For example, try comparing UK and US pronunciation of these words: - herbs - route - privacy
deleted 7y ago
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godelski 7y ago
All right everyone! We're ALL wrong! GIF is pronounced: https://youglish.com/search/gif/all https://youglish.com/search/gif/all
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- cardingggg 7y ago
  I don't know if different people see different video queues, but I had 2 subsequent videos of the same person pronouncing GIF as `GIFF` and `JYFE` :-/
  - godelski 7y ago
    Weird, the one I've see spells it out. But they aren't intending to say the image format.
jaimex2 7y ago
This could be a good way to build a large tagged dataset to train a neural net TTS engine.
artificialLimbs 7y ago
Very 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.
adriand 7y ago
This is also an amazing tool for anyone making electronic music that is looking for samples! I've been looking for something like this for quite some time: a tool to find audio clips on YouTube that match a particular phrase. Nothing like "lose your mind, get out of control" [1] to enhance a techno track! 1. https://youglish.com/search/lose%20your%20mind/all https://youglish.com/search/lose%20your%20mind/all
- zubspace 7y ago
  Don't want to rain on your parade, but the next passage comes straight out of their TOS: User acknowledges sole responsibility for obtaining required licenses. YOUGLISH.COM grants you permission to display, copy, distribute and download the Materials on this Site provided that: (1) both the copyright notice identified below and this permission notice appear in the Materials; (2) the use of such Materials is solely for personal, non-commercial use; and (3) the Materials are not modified in any way.
  - adriand 7y ago
    These are YouTube videos. I don't think the Youglish TOS has any sway over them. Besides, I'd rely on the fair use doctrine, which I think applies in this case.
thisisananth 7y ago
Wow.. This is amazing. As someone who mispronounces lot of words because of my education in Indian English which takes most of the sounds from British English, this is very helpful. Though there are google and merriam websters dictionary, sometimes it is not easy to get the pronunciation in a sentence. This fills that gap! I'm also curious know how it is implemented. Thanks & all the best!
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nimrody 7y ago
I've always struggled with the pronunciation of the word "route" and this doesn't seem to help. Try: https://youglish.com/search/route/us https://youglish.com/search/route/us vs https://youglish.com/search/route/uk https://youglish.com/search/route/uk
- deleted 7y ago
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martyvis 7y ago
It works well with the two words "segue" and "awry" as native 50+ year old Aussie English speaker that I only connected the spelling and pronunciation in the last 10 years or so.
skydv 7y ago
Ho do I go to next track, I don't see any button
vitorgrs 7y ago
Interesting, works even for pt-br vs pt-pt!
known 7y ago
https://forvo.com/word/scheduled/#en https://forvo.com/word/scheduled/#en is very interesting
mullikine 7y ago
This is very useful for searching youtube subtitles.
wonnage 7y ago
Apparently every English student in China learns the following exchange: How are you doing today? / I'm fine, thank you, and you? I've had trouble explaining why this is a weirdly formal response that native speakers would probably never use. So it was somewhat amusing to find zero search results for this! (not counting partial matches). It seems like the first phrases you learn in any foreign language reliably turn out to be phrases nobody actually uses.
- ghostDancer 7y ago
  I remember many years ago in Spain the most used book to learn English the first sentences were pretty much those and in one of the first lessons there was a sentence that became widely known: "My taylor is rich", it was synonym with studying English.
- ptah 7y ago
  I guess they would only use English in formal situations like when you go to shops etc. in those cases that is a normal exchange in UK english
- trosi 7y ago
  Can you elaborate a bit on why it's a weird response? What would be more appropriate? Non-native speaker here
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    It’s quite formal and ritualised in a language whose premier cultural exporter has been quite outwardly egalitarian since at least WWII. It’s just old fashioned. If you’re on this forum you’ve read enough English you’re unlikely to mess up but How are you? Great thanks. You? Fine, fine. It’s scripted insofar as no one cares how the other person actually is and answering I anything other than a positive fashion would be a faux pas but everything after “How are you?” is fluid. You can also go even less formal, e.g. “How’s it going?”
  - LambdaComplex 7y ago
    "I'm fine, how are you?" or "I'm fine, what about you?" would both be more normal in my opinion.
enz 7y ago
Thank you for this valuable work.
richrichardsson 7y ago
"Improve your American pronunciation". Search term : Aluminium Result : American saying Aluminum Search term : Solder Result : American saying "sodder"
- taejo 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You can argue that "aluminium" and "aluminum" are two different words, each pronounced the same way in Britain as in the US, but with the former being common in Britain and rare in the US and the other vice versa. But there is only one word "solder", and in most of the US it's pronounced like "sodder" would be, if that were a word at all.
  - mkl 7y ago
    I think they're trying to say it's American-focused, rather than English-focused. A search for "aluminium" returning pronunciation for "aluminum" contradicts your idea. Leaving the "l" out of "solder" is just bizarre to me as a New Zealander :-)
    - taejo 7y ago
      Ah, that makes sense. If you want exclusively British pronunciations, you can choose that option. I think it's equally reasonable to say that "aluminum" is the US pronunciation of the single word "alumin(i)um", I was just trying to divine GGP's argument. "Sodder" was equally bizarre to me when I heard it.
philliphaydon 7y ago
I searched for "Swap" because my co-worker used to say "swa app". https://youglish.com/search/swap/all https://youglish.com/search/swap/all https://youtu.be/vJSk4RR2QO4?t=313 https://youtu.be/vJSk4RR2QO4?t=313 This video comes back, and he actually says 'swat'...
bloak 7y ago
I'm going to rant here... I hate the way some people seem to think that a recording is a good way of explaining the pronunciation of an English word. In my (bigoted) opinion the only good way to explain the pronunciation of an English word is with a phonemic transcription into IPA. This is because even within England there are are lots of different pronunciations of the same sound. What you want (or at least I want) to know is whether the first vowel in "Malcow", say, is the same as the vowel in "hawk" or the vowel in "trap". A recording of a particular person saying just the word "Malcow" doesn't necessarily give you that information, and certainly not in an accessible way. (Also, a lesser consideration: there are some native speakers of English who can distinguish certain sounds in their pronunciation but cannot, or cannot easily, hear the difference between those sounds. I would guess that either they learnt to speak partly by watching people's lips or their hearing has deteriorated as they got older.) None of the above is specific to English. If I wanted to know how a French word is pronounced I'd prefer IPA to a recording just the same, if not more so. Admittedly not everyone loves IPA like I do (perhaps some people think it's a kind of beer). The online Oxford English Dictionary provides IPA transcriptions of both the British and American pronunciations and you can click on them to hear a recording. Perfect.
- azangru 7y ago
  As Daniel Jones wrote in his The Pronunciation of English (I am paraphrasing from the 1962 edition, because I do not have it at hand), it is impossible to learn the sounds of English from phonemic transcriptions alone; you need a living teacher, or, in absense of them, good recordings of representative sounds (he went on to reference certain good-quality authoritative recordings of the time). Youtube can be regarded as one source of such recordings.
  - bloak 7y ago
    Yes. There are two different things here: * Learning how to pronounce the sounds of English: for example, how to pronounce (standard) English /a/, which is, of course, different from (standard) German /a/. * Learning which sounds to use in a particular word: for example, is "swap" pronounced /swap/? (It isn't, of course. In practice most of the difficulties are caused by names of people and places.)
TadaScientist 7y ago
lets try "data" and "finance". dei·tuh not da ta fai·nans not fi nance
philshem 7y ago
The word biopic comes from “biographical picture” and shouldn’t rhyme with myopic. I only learned this recently. But, alas, on a website for correct pronunciation... https://youglish.com/search/Biopic/all https://youglish.com/search/Biopic/all? Here’s forvo, for contrast: https://forvo.com/word/biopic/ https://forvo.com/word/biopic/
vkhorikov 7y ago
https://translate.google.com/#en/ https://translate.google.com/#en/ has this feature too. Its pronunciation is perfect most of the time.
lowken10 7y ago
My daughter is a competitive speller and uses YouTube to get the pronunciation of difficult words. YouTube is an amazing resource.
reeves23423 7y ago
How did you even come up with this idea ?
DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
this is awesome, but I feel Scottish and Irish accents are underrepresented as per usual. Would you mind adding some videos from Kevin Bridges, Franky Boyle, Dara O'Brien, Chris O'Dowd and Dylan Moran pleeeeeease?
konamicode 7y ago
One of the harder things with English pronunciation I found was to be able to correctly vocalise "warm" and "worm", "crap" and "crepe" and similar. Think a resource like this would have helped.
Oras 7y ago
I will use this a LOT. This is the website I always wanted to have! I've tested different words and its quite accurate. I would suggest having the auto-completion for words just like Google search.
myfonj 7y ago
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.
pieter_mj 7y ago
I tried to find the American English pronunciation for 'agile', thinking it would be the same as in 'fragile' (silent i and e at the end), but for all examples, the 'i' is pronounced like in 'isle'. Can anyone chime in with the correct AE pronunciation? My English Dictionary corresponds to what i expected, but it is different in practice it seems.

770 points by interweb 7y ago

How do you leave feedback for what is just a bad pronunciation? The options I can see are: This is not english! Wrong caption? Wrong accent? Poor sound quality. Poor video quality. Crude/shocking content. I don't think any of those fit what I'm hearing for https://youglish.com/getcid/3905773/coxswain https://youglish.com/getcid/3905773/coxswain

hathawsh 7y ago
I agree there's an issue; "mispronounced" should be one of the feedback options. The third video for "especially" pronounces the word as "ekspecially". https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=478&v=Td2hfdXQ5x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=478&v=Td2hfdXQ5x... Love the site, though! Great work.
georgeam 7y ago
I would also like to see a feedback option for wrong word (same spelling). For example I searched for "melee" meaning (close to) "chaotic fight", and one of the entries referred to a person called "MeLee". It should be possible to flag this and either automatically or manually review the entry.
remedan 7y ago
Maybe the idea is to be strictly descriptivist? The way people actually pronounce the word _is_ the correct way. That's why you can listen to multiple examples and see what the common pronunciation is.

Mindless2112 7y ago

https://youglish.com/search/raison%20d%27%C3%AAtre/all https://youglish.com/search/raison%20d%27%C3%AAtre/all Not exactly English, but it's in the dictionary. I don't know if I should be impressed that the first result actually sounded pretty reasonable or disappointed at how bad some of these pronunciations are. Of course, the whole thing is gonna be "results may vary", I suppose... https://youglish.com/getcid/25032799/electrophoresis https://youglish.com/getcid/25032799/electrophoresis

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
If it's in the dictionary it is English. Or do we start throwing out everything we got from Norman French too? https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/raison%20d'etre https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/raison%20d'etre

adpirz 7y ago

https://youglish.com/search/tuple/all https://youglish.com/search/tuple/all? Roughly 60 / 40 short u ('tupple') vs long u ('toople').

umvi 7y ago
It's like gif (ghif) vs gif (jif)... even among native speakers it will be heavily polarized
- godelski 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20228480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20228480
autoexec 7y ago
Is the short u 'tupple' wrong despite it's popularity because if so I've been lying to people...
- Retra 7y ago
  You should use 'tupple' when referring to odd-length tuples, and 'toople' when referring to even-length tuples. That is obviously the only sane compromise.
  - kurtisc 7y ago
    Any ideas for 'trie'?
    - pvg 7y ago
      Yes. Correctly pronounced with a Khoisan click.
- pvg 7y ago
  It's not. Not even when used as a suffix in 'real' words. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quintuple https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quintuple In thinking about this, I realized I say short quintuple but long standalone tuple. I can probably retcon myself some reason but I don't think there is any.

sys13 7y ago

Got a message, 'you have been banned from this site'

autoexec 7y ago
What words were you looking for?

jalgos_eminator 7y ago

Wow, 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 May speech and the rest were Americans.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
If German listening and speaking practice is what you want, give this a try: https://eardoor.com https://eardoor.com it's got spaced repetition practice, plus lots of listening material and no sign up required. its free, and there's no annoying app to download.
- schemathings 7y ago
  Someone mentioned this in the past few months .. looks useful but I wish there were keyboard shortcuts ..
- yorwba 7y ago
  That site appears to violate the attribution requirements for the recordings they're using. https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org is mentioned in the attribution section, but the individual contributor of each audio file is not identified. If you don't care about the extra features, you could also just use Tatoeba's own search functionality: https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/search?query=&from=deu&to=eng&orphans=no&unapproved=no&user=&tags=&list=&has_audio=&trans_filter=limit&trans_to=und&trans_link=&trans_user=&trans_orphan=&trans_unapproved=&trans_has_audio=yes&sort=words https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/search?query=&from=deu&to=... Also works for languages other than German. ( https://tatoeba.org/eng/stats/sentences_by_language https://tatoeba.org/eng/stats/sentences_by_language )
- avinium 7y ago
  "This site has been suspended for copyright violations." I assume this happened in the last 8 hours or so..

smacktoward 7y ago

Finally, a way to learn how to pronounce such important conversational phrases as "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" and "Google flat Earth."

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

ldjb 7y ago

I like that this website offers a variety of pronunciations for each word. A lot of websites people use for pronunciations will provide a single pronunciation they deem to be correct, whereas there are multiple pronunciations in actual use.

flixic 7y ago

Searching for “gif” left me even more confused than I was.

selune 7y ago

I always used forvo.com for this kind of thing. Edit: It's a "pronunciation dictionary". Ppl just record how they say words and indicate their geography. Super useful for languages like English where there are a lot of regional varieties. And you can contribute too to the dictionary of your language. :) I'm no affiliated w/ it btw, just really love this website, have been using it for years.

noja 7y ago
Is the American pronunciation of "communal" correct there? https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_usa/ https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_usa/
- therein 7y ago
  Not in my experience.
- kwoff 7y ago
  No, it doesn't even sound like an American.. while the two downvoted ones do sound "correct".
- wyclif 7y ago
  No, this is wrong. It sounds like it's being mispronounced by a native German speaker. There is no hard initial vowel sound; the first syllable is not emphasized like that. There are three syllables in the word: com-mun-al and it's pronounced "kəˈmyo͞on(ə)l,ˈkämyənəl/" so the stress is on the second, not the first syllable.
  - jakubp 7y ago
    She does put the stress on the second syllable.
- ggggtez 7y ago
  Nope, the other one is right: https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_other/ https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_other/

WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago

This is desperately needed here in Silicon Valley...

DutchSysOps 7y ago

It sometimes work for me to learn new words :-)

sandworm101 7y ago

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 Archer than [insert random youtube person].

sailfast 7y ago
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?
- sandworm101 7y ago
  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.
groks 7y ago
A bit of Fry and Laurie, on language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg
kochikame 7y ago
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
- sandworm101 7y ago
  Not variety or accent. These shows use words carefully. They speak in exact meanings. The use a wider vocabulary and do not blur words. In fact much of their humor is based on misunderstandings rooted in pronunciation. Archer makes jokes about furriers and farriers. Blackadder about the formal name "Captain Darling" and the pet name "my darling", forcing the listener to maintain an understanding of context. These tricks aren't used on The Simpsons or the Big Bang Theory, shows largely aimed at lowest common denominators. Such differences are irrespective of accent or dialect.

333c 7y ago

I wouldn't normally point this out, but considering the site is about learning languages, the mistake on the homepage: > (Advance search) is glaring. That should be "Advanced search" as in "click here to perform an advanced (adj) search," not as in "click here to advance (verb) [a] search," which is nonsensical.

mnw21cam 7y ago
Okay, context makes you mostly right. But. Advance is also a adjective, as in "Advance booking", which is a booking in advance. Lots of people incorrectly write "Advanced booking" instead, which is a technologically superior booking, and probably not what they meant.
- 333c 7y ago
  Advance as an adjective (as in advance booking) means "ahead of time," whereas advanced as an adjective (as in advanced search) means "highly developed or complex," which is what is appropriate here. I was not trying to suggest in my original comment that "advance" as an adjective was inherently incorrect. All I was saying was that the phrase "advance search" is meaningless.

theLotusGambit 7y ago

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 noticed after clicking around a few times and then going back to YouTube's home page that my recommendations had been updated based on the random videos I'd been fed. Clearly this isn't desirable behavior, but I don't know if there's any way around it. For the time being for other users, I recommend using an incognito or private window.

gdw2 7y ago
As a user, open the page in a private window.
sundarurfriend 7y ago
> 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.

autoexec 7y ago

If this works for names I'm going to try to win a 30 year old bet with "Raistlin Majere"

lone_haxx0r 7y ago

Am I the only one that uses Google Translate "listen" option for learning pronunciation of weird words?

personlurking 7y ago
I recommend forvo.com (like another commenter mentioned), as GT doesn't work that great for certain languages (ex. Catalan is just a robotic voice).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

polyterative 7y ago

Man I wish I had this when learning English. I want it for German

reaperducer 7y ago

I hope that some YouTube publishers start using this. It's always jarring when some tech vlogger puts up a video with blatant mispronunciations. Sometimes it can be attributed to regionalisms (8-Bit Guy uses Texas-isms in addition to his usual set of mispronunciations). Sometimes it's just not paying attention, like one video game blogger who mispronounced "Imagic," showed an old Imagic TV commercial where the name was pronounced correctly, and then mispronounced "Imagic" immediately after. But some simply aren't bothering to look up the correct pronunciation of things. /Former broadcaster, trained in pronunciation, and in correcting the pronunciation of TV news anchors.

unixhero 7y ago
Some other guy being so nasal he can't pronounce monsters and it comes out as bonsters.

maerF0x0 7y ago

very cool! next features: 1) Find the videos that most agree with eachother and 2) Add other languages

bhelkey 7y ago
The site appears to support 7 languages in the rather hard to see dropdown near the youglish logo.

Ivoirians 7y ago

I can't stop playing with this. Plugging in foreign words and locations is pretty fun, like Nouakchott, N'Djamena, Lviv, Hagia Sophia, Ibiza, Louvre, etc. Just getting the variety of organic, candid pronunciations is fascinating.

pacomerh 7y ago

damn this is very useful, congrats

pacomerh 7y ago

hehe, I had to try the words I know are pronounced wrong. "Paella" it's pronounced paeya, not payeya. Also half the population says ecsetera instead of etcetera

dennisgorelik 7y ago
Only about 1 in 8 speakers uses incorrect "excetera" pronunciation: https://youglish.com/search/%22et%20cetera%22/all https://youglish.com/search/%22et%20cetera%22/all? Even 12% -- is far too many for my taste. But at least I can use "et cetera" pronunciation as a quick "literacy level" test.
- simias 7y ago
  It's an extremely common deformation I think, "excetera" is also a very common pronunciation in French. I really doubt it's heavily tied to literacy level at any level, it's probably more comfortable to pronounce. Remember that basically every word of your language (regardless of the language) was probably at some point considered some low-class corruption of the "proper" language. When it comes to English in particular look at the mess that's English spelling and the massive phonetic shifts it underwent during the past centuries, it seems a bit silly to single out "excetera" as the one bad pronunciation used by illiterate people.
  - jeanmichelx 7y ago
    > "excetera" is also a very common pronunciation in French. Not in my experience. Where are you from?
jfk13 7y ago
Try "February", and cringe.... > "Here are 4 tips that should help you perfect your pronunciation of 'February': > Break 'February' down into sounds: [FEB] + [YUH] + [REE] ..." Ugh!
- ramblerman 7y ago

jonwinstanley 7y ago

Unless you want to know how to say "Notre Dame". https://youglish.com/search/notre%20dame/all https://youglish.com/search/notre%20dame/all?

13415 7y ago
You can switch to French.
hathawsh 7y ago
If you're talking about the University of Notre Dame in Indiana USA, the most common pronunciation is /noʊtrəˈdeɪm/ or /noʊtərˈdeɪm/ (NOH-tər-DAYM). Simon Whistler's video uses both the American and French versions appropriately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhPDprqB_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhPDprqB_c

XCSme 7y ago

This is amazing, not only for learning english but also for quickly finding videos of a subject you are interested in (which is quicker than YouTube search as this is almost a "Feeling lucky" search).

news_hacker 7y ago
Exactly! This is amazing. I can search for esoteric words/ideas like "soulcraft" and instantly find a niche of interesting videos etc. to further my ideas. This is a gamechanger.

overthemoon 7y ago

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 consistently mixed up though, which means that word will continue to drive me insane. Neesh or nitch!? I mix it up when I use it without any rhyme or reason.

RugnirViking 7y ago
When english results are split in engish it is usually american english vs british english (which is often also spoken in australia and india) I can't say if that is the case here, but that is what I would suspect. As a british person I have usually heard it and used it as 'neesh'
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  It only seems to be some Americans pronounce it nitch, so maybe regional there, though I couldn't guess where or which is most common. Here in the UK essentially always neesh. It is from French after all. Edit: American audiobooks on the other hand seem to go 100% with nitch for some unexplainable reason.
  - jonfriese33 7y ago
    > It is from French after all. This is funny to me because I often see people on the internet mentioning how strange it is that Americans leave off the 'h' when pronouncing 'herb'.
    - irrational 7y ago
      Wait, some people pronounce herb with the 'h' not silent?

clarkmoody 7y ago

I wonder if language pronunciation will drift less over time, given the technology to record the spoken word and play it back at a much later day? Any linguists on HN thinking about vowel drift in the digital age?

elliekelly 7y ago
I also wonder if technology could have the opposite effect of expediting the adoption of “new” pronunciations only among certain demographics. It’s not linguistics (or maybe it is?) but the number of 20-something women speaking with vocal fry seems to have increased thanks to pop culture/the Kardashians.

calibas 7y ago

Here's a good one: https://youglish.com/search/triskaidekaphobia/all https://youglish.com/search/triskaidekaphobia/all Every person pronounces it differently.

noja 7y ago
These people pronouncing just that word pronounce it the same: https://forvo.com/word/triskaidekaphobia/#en https://forvo.com/word/triskaidekaphobia/#en
- calibas 7y ago
  Listen again. The British one pronounces "ai" differently, and the American ones put emphasis on different syllables.

MRD85 7y ago

I'm not actually sure how I feel about this. Australian English is distinct, and one of its key features is heavy use of shortened words and dropped letters. For example, the word "going" becomes "goin".

romseb 7y ago
You can choose between US, UK and AUS.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
You chose an example that is ubiquitous in USA, like "gonna".
- MRD85 7y ago
  It's not just going. It's nearly any word ending in a g. Ending = endin Surfing = surfin In Australia "Gonna" = "Going to"
  - jumelles 7y ago
    USA too.
godelski 7y ago
My intuition (and complete guess) is that ML is pretty far away from distinguishing slang words. Maybe it can understand it, at least to some extent, but categorizing it by country (well you really even need region) is harder.
avinium 7y ago
I'm Australian, and I would never recommend that someone learn English by listening to one of my countrymen. We are lazy, nasal, slurred speakers. Standard English or American are much more preferable.

iiv 7y ago

Interesting. I found one problem, though. (Or is it a feature?) All examples I listened to of "coup de grâce" pronounced it /ku də ɡrɑː/, while the "correct" way (if there is such a thing)is /ku də ɡrɑs/. This kind of thing must come up in more examples. I'm not usually on the prescriptive side of things, but I think it's important to know the "right" way to do things, at least when you're learning a language. On the other hand, hypercorrection will probably never disappear, so why not embrace it?

sovande 7y ago
> coup de grâce "Funny" that they have a french word and a french statement as the second and third example. But maybe not and it is intentionally, 'whois' says Registrant Country is FR. In any case, very cool and works impressively AFAICS. Wonder how long it will stay up until our Google overlords sends a cease and desist
jedmeyers 7y ago
“Coup de grace” caught my attention as well. It showed a speaker with a very notable RP pronouncing this phase with a very fake sounding French ‘r’ and no ‘s’ in the end, when the s sound is clearly present in the French and modern English pronunciation. Some might say that he butchered it.
playpause 7y ago
I agree with embracing hypercorrection (or at least, not getting upset about it), but it's also worth accepting that mispronounced loanwords can never really 'win' while the original language still exists, so there will always be a tension. 75m native French speakers will always win any argument about how to pronounce "grâce".
rahuldottech 7y ago
Off-topic, but looking up "/ku də ɡrɑː/" on Google now brings up this thread as one of the top results due to your comment. This comment of mine will only make it worse.

jlengrand 7y ago

Sounds cool! Funny thing : the first thing I was greeted with was "How to pronounce coup de grâce in English (1 out of 23)". Being French, I do find that a little hard to swallow :D

skynetv2 7y ago

I typed in "what is my name?" and it took me to a video of a southern preacher's sermon. lol

dave1619 7y ago

Does this site violate YouTube's terms of service for putting banner ads/advertising on the same pages as the YT embedded videos?

quadrature 7y ago

Love it, does anyone know of a similar service for chinese ?.

sideral 7y ago
There is Chinese in the dropdown list.

bhelkey 7y ago

Several commenters in this thread missed the language drop down. In addition to being rather small, the drop down has an awful color contrast ratio of 2.75 : 1 between the dark grey text (#7f98ad) and the light grey background (#f5f5f5)[1]. Have you considered making this page more accessible? [1] https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.5/color-contrast https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.5/color-contrast

thallavajhula 7y ago

I found out about this tool just 3 days ago and now I see it on the front page of HN. I was trying to embed an audio version of my name's pronunciation on my blog, since, most people find it hard to pronounce my name. I googled a bit to see if there is any tool that would do it and stumbled upon this lovely app. I was amazed by the idea and accuracy of this app. It works well for the use case it was designed for. Unfortunately, mine was different.

fniephaus 7y ago

8 pronunciations of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in English: https://youglish.com/search/supercalifragilisticexpialidocious/all https://youglish.com/search/supercalifragilisticexpialidocio... Best result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2467&v=4axGm0g-1-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2467&v=4axGm0g-1...

rkuykendall-com 7y ago
One clip was so intriguing, I had to go back and watch the whole thing, and it was really good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Za1TlYvBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Za1TlYvBc I'm a native English speaker but this could actually be a very cool discovery tool. I typed in my own (relatively rare) last name and found cool graduations and community organization videos.
- mlrtime 7y ago
  That led me on a 30 minute divergence, thanks :)

luqa 7y ago

the website name doesn't make it obvious, but they support 7 languages. There's a little dropdown on the right of the big "Youglish" logo. I tried it in Italian (my native language) and it works extremely well.

abdusco 7y ago

Really cool site, I can see myself using this extensively for learning German. One cool "feature" is that I get to see videos on various topics that I wouldn't normally search for. Invaluable for training the ear.

OrgNet 7y ago

https://youglish.com/search/Worcestershire/all https://youglish.com/search/Worcestershire/all https://youglish.com/search/Quinoa/all https://youglish.com/search/Quinoa/all

tabtab 7y ago

I tried Youtube, but only learned to meow and play 80's song on piano.

open-source-ux 7y ago

This is really helpful even for speakers of English since there are so many ways to pronounce the same word between countries and even within a country. For example, try comparing UK and US pronunciation of these words: - herbs - route - privacy

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godelski 7y ago

All right everyone! We're ALL wrong! GIF is pronounced: https://youglish.com/search/gif/all https://youglish.com/search/gif/all

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cardingggg 7y ago
I don't know if different people see different video queues, but I had 2 subsequent videos of the same person pronouncing GIF as `GIFF` and `JYFE` :-/
- godelski 7y ago
  Weird, the one I've see spells it out. But they aren't intending to say the image format.

jaimex2 7y ago

This could be a good way to build a large tagged dataset to train a neural net TTS engine.

artificialLimbs 7y ago

Very 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.

adriand 7y ago

This is also an amazing tool for anyone making electronic music that is looking for samples! I've been looking for something like this for quite some time: a tool to find audio clips on YouTube that match a particular phrase. Nothing like "lose your mind, get out of control" [1] to enhance a techno track! 1. https://youglish.com/search/lose%20your%20mind/all https://youglish.com/search/lose%20your%20mind/all

zubspace 7y ago
Don't want to rain on your parade, but the next passage comes straight out of their TOS: User acknowledges sole responsibility for obtaining required licenses. YOUGLISH.COM grants you permission to display, copy, distribute and download the Materials on this Site provided that: (1) both the copyright notice identified below and this permission notice appear in the Materials; (2) the use of such Materials is solely for personal, non-commercial use; and (3) the Materials are not modified in any way.
- adriand 7y ago
  These are YouTube videos. I don't think the Youglish TOS has any sway over them. Besides, I'd rely on the fair use doctrine, which I think applies in this case.

thisisananth 7y ago

Wow.. This is amazing. As someone who mispronounces lot of words because of my education in Indian English which takes most of the sounds from British English, this is very helpful. Though there are google and merriam websters dictionary, sometimes it is not easy to get the pronunciation in a sentence. This fills that gap! I'm also curious know how it is implemented. Thanks & all the best!

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nimrody 7y ago

I've always struggled with the pronunciation of the word "route" and this doesn't seem to help. Try: https://youglish.com/search/route/us https://youglish.com/search/route/us vs https://youglish.com/search/route/uk https://youglish.com/search/route/uk

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martyvis 7y ago

It works well with the two words "segue" and "awry" as native 50+ year old Aussie English speaker that I only connected the spelling and pronunciation in the last 10 years or so.

skydv 7y ago

Ho do I go to next track, I don't see any button

vitorgrs 7y ago

Interesting, works even for pt-br vs pt-pt!

known 7y ago

https://forvo.com/word/scheduled/#en https://forvo.com/word/scheduled/#en is very interesting

mullikine 7y ago

This is very useful for searching youtube subtitles.

wonnage 7y ago

Apparently every English student in China learns the following exchange: How are you doing today? / I'm fine, thank you, and you? I've had trouble explaining why this is a weirdly formal response that native speakers would probably never use. So it was somewhat amusing to find zero search results for this! (not counting partial matches). It seems like the first phrases you learn in any foreign language reliably turn out to be phrases nobody actually uses.

ghostDancer 7y ago
I remember many years ago in Spain the most used book to learn English the first sentences were pretty much those and in one of the first lessons there was a sentence that became widely known: "My taylor is rich", it was synonym with studying English.
ptah 7y ago
I guess they would only use English in formal situations like when you go to shops etc. in those cases that is a normal exchange in UK english
trosi 7y ago
Can you elaborate a bit on why it's a weird response? What would be more appropriate? Non-native speaker here
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  It’s quite formal and ritualised in a language whose premier cultural exporter has been quite outwardly egalitarian since at least WWII. It’s just old fashioned. If you’re on this forum you’ve read enough English you’re unlikely to mess up but How are you? Great thanks. You? Fine, fine. It’s scripted insofar as no one cares how the other person actually is and answering I anything other than a positive fashion would be a faux pas but everything after “How are you?” is fluid. You can also go even less formal, e.g. “How’s it going?”
- LambdaComplex 7y ago
  "I'm fine, how are you?" or "I'm fine, what about you?" would both be more normal in my opinion.

enz 7y ago

Thank you for this valuable work.

richrichardsson 7y ago

"Improve your American pronunciation". Search term : Aluminium Result : American saying Aluminum Search term : Solder Result : American saying "sodder"

taejo 7y ago
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You can argue that "aluminium" and "aluminum" are two different words, each pronounced the same way in Britain as in the US, but with the former being common in Britain and rare in the US and the other vice versa. But there is only one word "solder", and in most of the US it's pronounced like "sodder" would be, if that were a word at all.
- mkl 7y ago
  I think they're trying to say it's American-focused, rather than English-focused. A search for "aluminium" returning pronunciation for "aluminum" contradicts your idea. Leaving the "l" out of "solder" is just bizarre to me as a New Zealander :-)
  - taejo 7y ago
    Ah, that makes sense. If you want exclusively British pronunciations, you can choose that option. I think it's equally reasonable to say that "aluminum" is the US pronunciation of the single word "alumin(i)um", I was just trying to divine GGP's argument. "Sodder" was equally bizarre to me when I heard it.

philliphaydon 7y ago

I searched for "Swap" because my co-worker used to say "swa app". https://youglish.com/search/swap/all https://youglish.com/search/swap/all https://youtu.be/vJSk4RR2QO4?t=313 https://youtu.be/vJSk4RR2QO4?t=313 This video comes back, and he actually says 'swat'...

bloak 7y ago

I'm going to rant here... I hate the way some people seem to think that a recording is a good way of explaining the pronunciation of an English word. In my (bigoted) opinion the only good way to explain the pronunciation of an English word is with a phonemic transcription into IPA. This is because even within England there are are lots of different pronunciations of the same sound. What you want (or at least I want) to know is whether the first vowel in "Malcow", say, is the same as the vowel in "hawk" or the vowel in "trap". A recording of a particular person saying just the word "Malcow" doesn't necessarily give you that information, and certainly not in an accessible way. (Also, a lesser consideration: there are some native speakers of English who can distinguish certain sounds in their pronunciation but cannot, or cannot easily, hear the difference between those sounds. I would guess that either they learnt to speak partly by watching people's lips or their hearing has deteriorated as they got older.) None of the above is specific to English. If I wanted to know how a French word is pronounced I'd prefer IPA to a recording just the same, if not more so. Admittedly not everyone loves IPA like I do (perhaps some people think it's a kind of beer). The online Oxford English Dictionary provides IPA transcriptions of both the British and American pronunciations and you can click on them to hear a recording. Perfect.

azangru 7y ago
As Daniel Jones wrote in his The Pronunciation of English (I am paraphrasing from the 1962 edition, because I do not have it at hand), it is impossible to learn the sounds of English from phonemic transcriptions alone; you need a living teacher, or, in absense of them, good recordings of representative sounds (he went on to reference certain good-quality authoritative recordings of the time). Youtube can be regarded as one source of such recordings.
- bloak 7y ago
  Yes. There are two different things here: * Learning how to pronounce the sounds of English: for example, how to pronounce (standard) English /a/, which is, of course, different from (standard) German /a/. * Learning which sounds to use in a particular word: for example, is "swap" pronounced /swap/? (It isn't, of course. In practice most of the difficulties are caused by names of people and places.)

TadaScientist 7y ago

lets try "data" and "finance". dei·tuh not da ta fai·nans not fi nance

philshem 7y ago

The word biopic comes from “biographical picture” and shouldn’t rhyme with myopic. I only learned this recently. But, alas, on a website for correct pronunciation... https://youglish.com/search/Biopic/all https://youglish.com/search/Biopic/all? Here’s forvo, for contrast: https://forvo.com/word/biopic/ https://forvo.com/word/biopic/

vkhorikov 7y ago

https://translate.google.com/#en/ https://translate.google.com/#en/ has this feature too. Its pronunciation is perfect most of the time.

lowken10 7y ago

My daughter is a competitive speller and uses YouTube to get the pronunciation of difficult words. YouTube is an amazing resource.

reeves23423 7y ago

How did you even come up with this idea ?

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago

this is awesome, but I feel Scottish and Irish accents are underrepresented as per usual. Would you mind adding some videos from Kevin Bridges, Franky Boyle, Dara O'Brien, Chris O'Dowd and Dylan Moran pleeeeeease?

konamicode 7y ago

One of the harder things with English pronunciation I found was to be able to correctly vocalise "warm" and "worm", "crap" and "crepe" and similar. Think a resource like this would have helped.

Oras 7y ago

I will use this a LOT. This is the website I always wanted to have! I've tested different words and its quite accurate. I would suggest having the auto-completion for words just like Google search.

myfonj 7y ago

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.

pieter_mj 7y ago

I tried to find the American English pronunciation for 'agile', thinking it would be the same as in 'fragile' (silent i and e at the end), but for all examples, the 'i' is pronounced like in 'isle'. Can anyone chime in with the correct AE pronunciation? My English Dictionary corresponds to what i expected, but it is different in practice it seems.