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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation
- BelenusMordred 5y agoThis is really cool. As a native speaker it's not really relevant for me but impressed nonetheless. Excellent site, I wish there was something equivalent for Mandarin or German. Tried this one off the bat - https://youglish.com/pronounce/elucidation/english https://youglish.com/pronounce/elucidation/english?
- yorwba 5y agoYou can switch the language in the "YouGlish for English" header (or by modifying the URL).
- ourcat 5y agoNice. But I searched for 'Aluminium'. It gave me results for 'Aluminum' (American English).
- mseepgood 5y agoYou can choose the accent below the search field.
- dang 5y agoOne past thread: Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20225093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20225093 - June 2019 (236 comments)
- Imnimo 5y agoI looked up "synecdoche" (to see if it would give me this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-n1vGeVIXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-n1vGeVIXo), and a few of the examples are of people saying "Schenectady" but mis-transcribed. I guess you can just use your judgment to filter out a few mistakes, so no big deal.
- nahuel0x 5y agoBesides pronunciation, this is great for searching videos by audio content. I'm surprised this is not an standard youtube feature.
- jobigoud 5y agoThis is curated for good close captions. Youtube has an option for auto transcription that sometimes gives crap results and couldn't be used for a tool like this.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoI tried searching for "Let's go Brandon" to see if it would return any funny results. But it only found "Brandon". A little disappointed.
- eesmith 5y agoWe use it to settle pronunciation arguments. Sometimes we find that we're both right when the word has multiple pronunciations. Those are the best.
- cardanome 5y agoThe categorization of dialects is a bit disappointing. What the hell is an "Uk" accent? So a posh southern English accent would be the same category as a northern one? I get that considering nearly every city has its own dialect of English it would hard to offer some sensible mapping but it still feels kind of wrong. If I search for the word "climate" in "Uk", "Irish" or "New Zealand" I get the same British English video, otherwise a Scottish English video for US. Don't offer me that many choices if you are going to lump them all together anyway. Honestly they should have just offered a switch between American English and "British English" (the Received Pronunciation that many learn at school). Other than that, seems like a great idea and already working reasonably well.
- RobertRoberts 5y agoFrom a humorous perspective, how should US pronounce "wash" from a Wisconsin accent (sounds like "warsh"). Or how to pronounce "car" or "bar" from a Boston accent. (sounds like "cah" and "bah") Southern's in the US say "ant/aint" instead of "aunt". And what about "y'all"? etc, etc... Maybe there is similarities with the varied UK accents?
- Hemospectrum 5y agoIn fact, English dialects in the British isles have huge variety compared to those in North America, by at least an order of magnitude. It sounds counterintuitive at first because the differences in land mass and population size are the other way around, but the actual biggest factor here is the amount of time that these regions have had English-speaking communities. Give it a few more centuries and the rate of local dialect differentiation will start to catch up.
- User23 5y agoAmerican English dialects trace back to the various British groups that settled the different colonies. Tangier Island[1] for example has an ancient Cornish dialect. Ocracoke Island[2] has what is probably the closest thing to a living Elizabethan English speech community. Those are extreme examples, but the stereotypical New England and Southeastern dialects have similar origins, they're just considerably watered down due to the lack of isolation. Meanwhile, the standard "BBC English" Received Pronunciation is actually quite the novelty, comparatively speaking. [1] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180206-the-tiny-us-island-with-a-british-accent https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180206-the-tiny-us-isla... [2] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-that-speaks-elizabethan-english https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-th...
- jonatron 5y agoThis is a better idea than searching for word+" pronunciation" , because of videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hx052Tiz9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hx052Tiz9E
- ik8s 5y agoI feel like this would be even more helpful to me if it would only show me videos of people's faces while they are pronouncing the word, so I can see their mouth positions.
- jobigoud 5y agoIt would be very artificial. I love youglish because the words are in context, in the flow of speech, including liaisons with preceding and following words, and for more advanced uses it can be used not only for pronunciation but to see how a word is actually used in discourse.
- dyukqu 5y agoStill no consensus on how to pronounce "gif".
- RobertRoberts 5y agoYes there is, it's now unanimously pronounced "gif".
- Koshkin 5y agoWhich is... how?
- bovermyer 5y agoThat's the joke. Go back and read it again.
- Koshkin 5y agoAh... I will go and downvote it, then.
- catlikesshrimp 5y agoGIF; /ɡɪf/ GHIF or /dʒɪf/ JIF From wikipedia
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yesenadam 5y agoI've pronounced it "hiff" since I started learning Spanish.
- glandium 5y agoObligatory Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1AL2EMvVy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1AL2EMvVy0
- zepearl 5y agoNice :) So, router seems to be pronounced with "UK" selected as "rooter", with "US" selected as "rauter".
- Symbiote 5y agoIn Britain, route rhyming with boot means the path travelled. Rout rhyming with sprout means cutting a slot in wood etc. The same difference holds for router and router.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoThe rule is not hard and fast, however. Some BrE speakers will use "root" for "path travelled", and I've heard both BrE and AmE speakers describe their spinning bladed power tool as a "rooter".
- Symbiote 5y agoMaybe writing "router and router" wasn't very clear. Those are "rout-er" and "route-r". As far as I know (and I'm British), for path travelled or a device directing those paths, all BrE speakers rhyme route and router with hoot and hooter. The power tool, the older manual tool, and the slots they cut, are more obscure. Rout and router should rhyme with shout and shouter in BrE, but I would expect mistakes or guesses for this router. With shoot/shout, boot/bout, loot/lout, scoot/scout, snoot/snout, toot/tout, in BrE a path travelled should be a root. But there's also brute/flute/jute/lute etc, which could be better written broot/floot/joot/loot, leaving the -ute for words like mute, tribute, minute (small), repute. But I won't try and fix English in a HN comment.
- zepearl 5y agoThat's nice to remember - thank you :)
- softfalcon 5y agoI feel bad for anyone who tries to get English pronunciation "correct". I'm Canadian. My family is of Scottish, Irish, and English descent. I am painfully aware of how many dialects, exceptions to words, weird pronunciations, and accents affect what should be the same word. My wife is Russian and is fluent in English from having lived here in Canada since she was a child. We regularly get into arguments about how something is pronounced. Most of the time, we find that it's commonly said one way here in this part of Canada, but has 1 different pronunciation in a different part of Canada and 3 more pronunciations back in the UK or Australia. Since Canada is very multi-cultural and there are real Scottish, Irish, Indian, Australian, etc speakers everywhere here, who can say what is the right way to say a word in English? Can we really say that the word is supposed to be X when I have 5 people in the room, all with legitimate other ways to say it that are true for their version of English? Who is right? Does it matter who is right? How much should we care about correct pronunciation at all? It's not even a pedantic discussion anymore for me, it's a legitimate and real confusion day-to-day. As an example, I went to the above linked "youglish" site and it gave a suggestion for "courage". Some semi-British, possibly Eastern US sounding person said "coo-rah-dg" but here in my part of Canada, I would say it as "cur-ah-dg". They sound rather different and in passing, you might even think I'm saying a different word than "courage". Both are right, but here is a website that will cause someone to tell me my pronunciation is wrong. I feel like English is too broken and disparate in its many acceptable spoken variations to have a site like this ever work without stoking further arguments.
- filereaper 5y agoYup, I feel this. Take for example "Regina", I've always pronouced it re-gih-na, how Regina Saskatchewan was pronounced on CBC and elsewhere. But here was a lady with same name of Regina who pronounced it re-gi-nah which I guess is more common south of the border?
- bluGill 5y agoThis is a real problem. If we don't come up with one single correct way to pronounce every single word, English will fork into multiple different languages. This has happened - English at the core is based on German (an old German not spoken anymore - and one we probably can't reconstruct), but the French and other influences over the years mean few can find anything in common with German (which has gone a different way). I could also point out Spanish/Italian, or Swedish/Danish. I have no doubt that you can find the same in Africa and Asia, but I don't know enough about their languages to comment. While we are at it, can we reform English spelling to make sense?
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 5y agoI love it! Though the results for "buoy" were mixed! (British guy catering presumably to intl/US audience pronouncing it incorrectly :D)
- m00dy 5y agogreat service !!!
- air7 5y agoDoes anyone know how the site searchea YouTube for videos with certain words? Or is it crawled?
- abd-nh 5y agoI came across YouGlish a while ago and found it really useful for finding interesting content in different languages. Shameless plug: I wrote an add-on to use YouGlish with Anki. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/38866997 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/38866997
- chagaif 5y agoI've been using this for more than a year now, it's amazing!
- soneca 5y agoAt the moment I see a few comments criticizing the mixed results in accents and pronunciations. I am a Brazilian who speaks English at work, so I just wanted to share my use case for Youglish. I go to Youglish whenever I have no idea on how to pronounce a word. I read English much more than I listen to English (HN contributes to that), so it is not uncommon to find such words. I don’t need (nor want) to find the right accent to emulate or reach the perfect pronunciation to pass for a native speaker. I just want to be able to pronounce in a way that my coworkers will understand which word I am using. My coworkers are kind and reasonable, so they don’t expect perfect pronunciation from me either, they just want to understand the words that are coming out of my mouth. So, for me, it is not relevant at all that the accents might be mixed. As long as I learn a way to pronounce it, no matter which way. Youglish is a great resource for me. (another is Grammarly, I stil don’t know why they don’t direct they marketing to non-native English speakers more, as it is perfect for us)
- FalconSensei 5y agoBrazilian here: what really helped me was learning to use the pronunciation part of the dictionary + listen on google.
- _the_inflator 5y agoSecond that. Especially Grammarly does an amazing job. Also the possibility to use different styles. Another tip from me: Deepl.com Way better than Babelfish. Best translator tool there is in my point of view.
- mrzool 5y agoDeepl is amazing. I use it several times a day for translating fairly complex sentences, idioms and figures of speech, usually from English (my second language) to German (my third language and the one I currently work with). Every time I'm amazed by how well it works. It really makes my life a lot easier. Another language tool I love and use daily is https://www.powerthesaurus.org https://www.powerthesaurus.org
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- buserror 5y agoI love that "coup de grace" is listed in the examples, as it's actually... French! Reminds me of the famous (fictional?) quote of Bush president saying "There is no french word for entrepreneur !" :-)
- enz 5y agoAs a French native speaker, listening to "coup de grâce" as pronounced in English seems a bit weird ahah
- lucb1e 5y agoAs a Dutch speaker, germanic not romanic language, the pronunciation of coup de grâce sounds weird to me as well. What's even weirder is an English speaker trying to repeat my name after me!
- glandium 5y agoI'll never understand why the "ce" is not pronounced, while OTOH in many cases silent letters in French are pronounced in the English equivalent...
- buserror 5y agoespecially since the english pronunciation, as listened by a french speaking person, means literally "hit with fat", bringing to mind someone fishing off a creature by slapping it with a large piece of pork belly :-)
- ksenzee 5y agoEnglish is my first language, I also speak French, and I often avoid saying French phrases out loud in English, for fear of pronouncing them "wrong" and sounding pretentious.
- toyg 5y agoYeah, the Brits have bastardized so many French words (e.g. garage).
- skibz 5y agoI've always been curious about the North American and UK pronunciations of the word "solder". Why are they subtly different?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoWhatever the reason, it probably explains "caulk" too (US "cawk", UK "cawlk") [EDIT: "cawk" is a better rendition of AmE. ]
- bovermyer 5y agoAs an American English speaker, I have never heard "caulk" pronounced "cork." It's always been "cawk" for me.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoI edited it reflect your better rendition.
- Lio 5y agoThat’s nothing. I have a little WTF moment every time I hear an American pronounce the word “buoy”. :P I’m sure that’s reciprocated on more that a few cases too. :D
- enz 5y agoThis is a nice project.
- 999900000999 5y agoOutstanding! But why post this as for English. It supports so many other languages. I'm studying Chinese and this will help.
- herpderperator 5y ago> Your daily search quota has exceeded. > Please come back tomorrow or upgrade to one of YouGlish's Premium account plans. Well, that was a fun 10 minutes while it lasted... One can definitely have endless fun with this. It's almost like clicking "Random" on Wikipedia except you have to think of a word/phrase first. Or use Wikipedia's "Random" and input that word into YouGlish :D
- sdo72 5y agoI like this site, it helps me a lot with pronunciation especially someone like me that doesn't go on the TV or watch many videos. Since the day knowing this site, I found out that I had pronounced many words incorrectly in the past. A few things people have pointed out, we have to go through sorting out the accents, multiple pronunciations for the same word, etc... But this is very good for the basic pronunciation search.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eastendguy 5y agoAnything like this for Chinese?
- eastendguy 5y agoAh, it supports many languages - great!
- loxias 5y agoI just saw that it did and yelled out with glee. Now I just gotta tie this to google translate, some earbuds, a hand control for my pocket, and software glue and confuse the HECK out of my (native Chinese speaking) partner.
- bobthechef 5y agoCheck out these bad pronunciations: - succinct - mischievous - coup de grace - comptroller
- flerovium 5y agoWhat's wrong with the pronunciation of "succinct"? Most are suh-sinked. I'm a native speaker. That's how you say it.
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoLol fuck English pronunciation. We don't have to sound like Californian Valley douchebags anymore. English is an international language. It no longer belongs to the oppressor. Don't sell out your culture. German accented English=sex.
- crossroadsguy 5y agoWish people with other accents could say that. I have seen on multiple occasions, e.g., someone from France struggling to churn out a single fucking intelligible English word out of their mouth - “ooo, what a sexy accent!!” An Indian speaking impeccable English while being perfectly intelligible but with the distinct Indian accent - “ughh, you’ve a funny accent”. Behind the backs that ughh often becomes yikes.
- fernandotakai 5y agoagreed. i try to make my accent as neutral as possible, but at the same time, as long as people can understand me... why bother? if someone speaks my native language with an accent, i wouldn't give a single fuck, but for some reason, every english speak must have a Californian accent.
- loxias 5y ago> every english speak must have a Californian accent. No they don't! And don't trust anyone who says otherwise. If you want to improve your English for the ears of native speakers, it's vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary, grammar, and vocabulary.
- ingvul 5y agoAgree. At least in Europe we have, I believe, what I like to call "European English" accent: it's a mix of American English (because Hollywood + Netflix) plus British English (because that's was is taught in schools) plus your local accent (German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.). We all understand each other very well (even when we make mistakes, because we usually make the same mistakes). It's funny because whenever a native English speaker joins the conversation, some of us may have trouble understanding him.
- mattbee 5y agoIt's missing Yorkshire! I live in a farming village, you do occasionally hear voices like this one - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ScELaXMCVis https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ScELaXMCVis
- mattbee 5y ago(this is from a 35 year-old Emmy-winning documentary series called The Story Of English - all online at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36)
- Causality1 5y agoI found it fascinating he appears to be a farmer yet he's wearing a vest and tie. Is he dressed up for the interview or is that normal? I can't imagine the nightmare of sweaty chafing I would be if I tried to do a physical job dressed like that.
- toyg 5y agoPeople used to dress up more, possibly because they lived in colder environments. This said - it's probably just a TV thing here.
- hyperpallium2 5y agoThe pronunciation of "pronunciation" is with "nun" not "noun", unlike "pronounce". But "correct" pronunciation is community-based: that's where language came from and that's where it remains. The only way for there to be a correct pronunciation is if people name it "Correct Pronunciation".
- euske 5y agoI just found out that you can search "covfefe" on this. It's not even on most dictionaries! I was about to write that "one downside of this is that you can only search a word that can be speech recognized"... then I've seen this which kinda blew my mind.