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Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

• honksillet 3y ago
  I’m guessing this was done by using YouTube’s api to look at transcripts, which are time stamped. This is great. Anyone know if there is a Chinese equivalent video platform that has time stamped characters?
  • zyxin 3y ago
    This very same site also supports Chinese, along with plenty of other languages! It's linked in the footer. https://youglish.com/chinese https://youglish.com/chinese
• snerc 3y ago
  This site has resolved so many debates.
• fallat 3y ago
  This is an incredible tool. I would love this for French.
  • TontonNestor 3y ago
    It does French too. Just click on English and a drop down menu appears.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • hmry 3y ago
    Well you're in luck, because it supports French too, and dozens of other languages. You can click on the "English" with the little triangle to change the language
• teach 3y ago
  This is really interesting! Instead of "here's how you are SUPPOSED to pronounce" any given word or phrase, you show how a bunch of native English speakers actually pronounce it. Maybe everyone is wrong, but if your goal is to be understood then you'd be better mimicking what they do than just being technically correct. :) For example, there's a street in the city I live in spelled "Guadalupe". Natives pretty much uniformly pronounce it GWAD-uh-LOOP.
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    Same for Hermosa Beach, Los Gatos, and many other CA towns. Even though I speak Spanish, I'm always caught off-guard when someone pronounces these places the Spanish way.
    • toast0 3y ago
      The one that weirds me out is San Pedro, CA vs San Pedro Square in San Jose, CA. The first one is pronounced peedrow, nearly always. The second one is pronounced paydrow (as it would be in Spanish, or for a person), most of the time. San is optional for San Pedro, but not for San Pedro Square.
      • gnicholas 3y ago
        Very interesting! My grandfather had a store in San Pedro, and I always heard it pronounced the way you describe. I live in the Bay Area but have never heard of San Pedro Square. I wonder if it's pronounced more authentically because of (1) the time period in which it was built/popularized, or (2) the local population. I assume that geographic areas named these days are somewhat more likely to be pronounced authentically (at least Spanish-language ones, in areas like CA that now have large Spanish-speaking populations). Also, from a look at Google Maps, it appears there are a lot of Spanish-language businesses in the area. If the area is largely Spanish-speaking, there's a much better chance it would be pronounced authentically.
  • narag 3y ago
    That's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.
• formerly_proven 3y ago
  Though some British YouTubers emulate some kind of posh enunciation (or what is perceived as such), which is really just weird and jarring
• thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
  This is beautiful. Beyond pronunciation, I want to know how to use words in a sentence. (I play a lot of Scrabble and constantly looking up words I don't know to try incorporate them in my daily speech, this will help a lot)
  • brobinson 3y ago
    Wiktionary will go into exhaustive detail (perhaps too much detail) about all the use cases of a word, including example sentences: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronunciation Works great for Chinese and Japanese, too.
• wahnfrieden 3y ago
  So how might they be harvesting YouTube transcripts? I know of userscripts that can do it, but anything in the backend I'm not sure how they'd do it without ToS issues
  • piyh 3y ago
    Nothing in the official YouTube API allows you to download captions. Even if you could, you'd be rate limited really hard because the YouTube API does not have any paid tiers and you can get cut off at any point. Websites like this exist because the eye of Sauron has not yet gazed upon the land.
    • wahnfrieden 3y ago
      They have enough of an archive to not need to grow it if they get cut off somehow
• modeless 3y ago
  I use Youglish all the time as a native speaker, it's awesome. Usually it confirms my suspicion that words I'm unsure of are actually pronounced both ways by different people. But occasionally I'm surprised.
• blankton 3y ago
  A great project. I tried searching for the german word "Eichhörnchen" and the third pronounciation was in swiss german. That is a different language. Use with caution :)
  • stratom 3y ago
    It even found one occurence of an Austrian slang pronounciation of "Eichhörnchen": "Oachkatzl" Though, in the video it is wrongly claimed that "Oachkatzlschwoaf" would mean squirrel, but in fact it means tail of a squirrel (Eichhörnchenschwanz).
    • skykooler 3y ago
      Which I've only encountered as the name of a Trackmania map.
• CharlesW 3y ago
  Pro tip: Use YouTube to learn the pronunciation of non-English words, too! Hors d'oeuvres: https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM Châteauneuf-du-Pape: https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E Laphroaig: https://youtu.be/UdE20EFNDUs https://youtu.be/UdE20EFNDUs
  • hybridtupel 3y ago
    This is hurting my ears. There is something similar for German: E.g. Zucchini: https://youtu.be/RqPqOTFh-Sc https://youtu.be/RqPqOTFh-Sc
  • TacticalCoder 3y ago
    > Hors d'oeuvres: https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM > > Châteauneuf-du-Pape: https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E Are these jokes? It's not at all the french pronunciation of these. As in: it's so wrong a native french speaker won't even have a clue what you're trying to say (it's so off base it's totally impossible). Try to pronounce "pneu" (tire) in french, that's good one: https://youtu.be/q8aDEF7FH8o https://youtu.be/q8aDEF7FH8o (and that's the real, proper, correct, pronunciation of "pneu" in french)
    • karaterobot 3y ago
      > Are these jokes? It would seem they are, yes.
    • CharlesW 3y ago
      Yes, they're jokes. They delighted me so much that I was compelled to share them.
    • gilleain 3y ago
      yes they are not great jokes. 'laphroaigh' is la-frayg i guess. More <https://www.thrillist.com/spirits/scotch/how-to-pronounce-scotch-whisky-names https://www.thrillist.com/spirits/scotch/how-to-pronounce-sc...>
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• johncessna 3y ago
  really good idea. I already use youtube for name pronunciation and this just hones that search better than hoping youtube's search comes through.
• codeTired 3y ago
  My shitty polish accent makes me unique though.
• guntherhermann 3y ago
  Wow, what a fantastic website. Thank you! It's great that it has other languages, as I'm fairly decent in English, but given that it's real examplse, and it highlights the text... brilliant design choice
• downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  If you actually learned using this you might end up with a mishmash of British and American pronunciations.
• scraptor 3y ago
  Very nice idea and great execution. Sometimes it includes clips where the generated subtitles are wrong and the word is actually a different one with similar pronunciation (German heiß -> heißt for a lot of this). Which brings to mind an interesting bias where it leaves out any examples that the AI transcription didn't recognise as the word, thus presenting only the "canonical" pronunciation according to whatever process trained the AI and potentially propagating AI artifacts into the speech of actual humans.
  • sinkwool 3y ago
    Or it could be a typo (as in man-made) My guess is that they only use Youtube videos that already have subtitles in the target language. But I'm curious to know how exactly they've built their database of videos/transcripts. I wonder if they curate the videos manually at all.
• layer8 3y ago
  C# and C++ devolve to just C, unfortunately. And I’m still not sure how to pronounce Azure. ;)
  • deadbeeves 3y ago
    I believe it's supposed to be like "erasure" without the "er".
• jcq3 3y ago
  I guess it leverages LLMs to do semantic search on YouTube audio dataset?
  • qntty 3y ago
    Systems like this predate LLMs. For example this one at UCLA https://tvnews.sscnet.ucla.edu/public/ https://tvnews.sscnet.ucla.edu/public/. Looks like this one has been around for a while https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://youglish.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://youglish....
• elicash 3y ago
  I found it odd their first two examples were power and courage, where the first example ("power") is an American, the second speaker ("courage") is British. I'm picturing myself using a tool like this with an unfamiliar language where it wouldn't be immediately obvious to me, say Spanish in Spain vs Mexico, and getting very confused, very quickly. I like it in concept, though!
• shadowgovt 3y ago
  This makes me legit tear-up, it's such a good idea. Best mashup of technologies I've seen in a while.
• filereaper 3y ago
  This is a very interesting site. I took the name "Regina" as an example as its pronounced very differently between Canada/UK and US. If you toggle through the site's region selectors it does indeed produce videos with the regionally correct pronouciation. (Admittedly I had a sample size of N=1 video each) So yeah, its a great start!
  • mathieuh 3y ago
    I assume in Canada/UK it rhymes with vagina? That's probably because the royal cipher of Elizabeth II was ER, with the 'R' being for Regina (Latin for 'queen'). So I would imagine that people have heard it in that context before. Just looking at it it looks like it should be pronounced "redgEEnuh".
    • filereaper 3y ago
      Yeah that's exactly right. I was only aware of the Canada/UK version and was caught off guard when used on a colleague that used "redgEEnuh" for their name.
• alister 3y ago
  Another useful site for hearing pronunciations is Forvo: https://forvo.com/ https://forvo.com/ Those are user contributed pronunciations, so there was an effort to say the word clearly. Although Youglish might be more authentic in a sense, I prefer hearing a word enunciated precisely if I want to learn the pronunciation. And I want to hear it in isolation, at least the first time, rather than in the middle of long sentence.
• shijie 3y ago
  Something I’ve learned as someone with high proficiency in another language that I learned in adulthood (I would never say fluent, maybe “functionally” fluent): Poor pronunciation (I.e. thick accent) but good grammar is usually more forgiven by a native than great pronunciation but poor grammar. Because then you sound more native, but you sound a bit… mentally slow. I am in the latter camp. My Mandarin Chinese accent is really quite good. But I sound like a child. So my suggestion to all learning a new language: keep a bit of your accent and heavily index on correct grammar and vocab and listening skills.
  • zwieback 3y ago
    I agree. I've been speaking (American) English 99% of the time for the past thirty years but still have a noticeable German accent, never get any flak for that. Apparently Joseph Conrad spoke with a heavy Polish accent so that's my excuse. What's sad is that educated people look down on people speaking "grammatically incorrect" even if their way of speaking is consistent within their group and conveying meaning perfectly. I just call that snobbery.
    • init 3y ago
      Henry Kissinger has a heavy German accent that didn't prevent him from becoming one of the most influential American politicians of the 20th century.
      • fsckboy 3y ago
        Henry Kissinger was also known as a ladies man. Once he was in his hotel room with a pretty woman when a world crisis broke out that required his attention. However, he was not answering the phone, so a desk clerk was sent up to the room. He knocked on the door and said "Mr Kissinger, I have a message for you". From behind the door he heard, "Go avey!" but it was important so he knocked again and said "Mr Kissinger, it is urgent that I speak to you!" and again "Go avey!" so for the third time he said "It is urgent, are you Kissinger!?" and the reply "No! I'm fuckingher! Now go avey!" My gf's mother told me that joke back in the day, with a very heavy South American accent, but it still worked, maybe a little better because she said "Kissin-gher". I saw Henry himself just a few years ago, right before Covid, in a NYC restaurant. He's extremely old, but he seemed very together. You might call him a "statesman", but he wasn't precisely a politician. Also, the post WWII/Cold War era opened the door, so to speak, to a large number of displaced Europeans, scholars, to give advice about East and Middle European issues, advanced science, etc. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Werner von Braun also come to mind.
• rafaelvasco 3y ago
  For me it was all about listening to a lot of people talking in English, memorizing the exact sounds and pronunciation. And then reading books out loud everyday. It helps that I have a very good ear, but it should work for anyone.
  • lottin 3y ago
    Without proper knowledge of English phonetics and dialects, this method isn't going to take you very far. For example, in English, vowel length carries phonetic information, whereas in other languages it does not. If you mother tongue happens to fall in the latter category, it's extremely unlikely that you'll figure out how vowel length works, or even that you have to pay attention to it.
    • deadbeeves 3y ago
      That's not true. I use stress timing without even realizing that I'm using it nor understanding what it means, but I can realize when someone doesn't use it. I learned it purely by ear, by mimicking the sounds other people make. More specifically, by copying their cadence.
      • lottin 3y ago
        Yeah, like I said, it's most unlikely that you're using vowel length correctly. You can't copy something you're not aware of. For example, without looking it up, would you say 'quit' and 'quid' are pronounced with the same vowel length or not?
        • deadbeeves 3y ago
          "Quid" is longer. >You can't copy something you're not aware of. If that was the case, babies would not be able to learn how to speak.
          • lottin 3y ago
            Babies haven't already acquired another language, when they're learning to speak, and so there's no interference. That's not the case when someone learns a second language later in life. > "Quid" is longer. Feel free to post a voice recording, so we can check.
• smokel 3y ago
  As a non-native speaker, I was interested in learning the perfect British accent. Turns out there is no such thing. There are many different accents, but none of them is the default. "Received pronunciation" [1] probably comes closest, but apparently it makes you sound like someone who is a non-native speaker and who tried to learn a default accent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
  • tarkin2 3y ago
    In fact, I find it strange when Germans, for example, have a 'perfect British accent'. Even I would say it's perfect. Problem is, no one speaks like that... except the Germans. It also goes with grammatical accuracy as well. If any German, or Nordic etc, says "With whom were you speaking" it marks them as a foreigner instantly.
    • bafe 3y ago
      There's something slightly irritating about German or Dutch people trying very hard to have that perfect British accent. I can't really tell why, but it always seems affected and pretentious. I much prefer the "wooden" (Holzern in German) accent of the Swiss
      • ehnto 3y ago
        Your opinion is common in language learning it seems, as most people praise a perfect accent but some get very offended by it. I couldn't tell you why, maybe it's a feeling of lack of authenticity? I find it impressive when someone has acquired a good accent personally since it's quite difficult to do.
        • tarkin2 3y ago
          I'm impressed but it's weird to compliment a non Brit on their perfect British accent when they don't sound like you, a British person...
        • 3y ago
• ibdf 3y ago
  Ha... this works better than I thought it would... maybe I will finally be able to pronounce "Squirrel"... but probably not.
• stephen_g 3y ago
  Interesting idea. I quite like in terms of the theory behind pronunciation Geoff Lindsay’s YouTube channel [1]. He does a similar thing featuring snippets demonstrating certain ideas - I’ve often wondered how he finds them, perhaps using something like this! 1. https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/featured https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/featured
• readams 3y ago
  I did a test and entered "saute." It worked, except that the first 5 videos were all "Binging with Babish", so it was the same person pronouncing the word. Still pretty cool though, and a lot better than the SEO spammed "how to pronounce" YouTube videos.
• ahmadnoid 3y ago
  As a non native speaker I use this a lot. Not for the pronunciation but for actual examples of the word I'm looking for.
• soneca 3y ago
  I use it from time to time and it is great. It helps that it’s such an easy to remember domain
• SagatPetchy 3y ago
  This will be very helpful to me, as someone who is learning several of the supported languages. One piece of feedback: when I choose Cantonese, all I get is Mandarin results. I assume it's because the subtitles of almost all Cantonese videos are actually written in standard Chinese (with traditional characters). It would be pretty hard to distinguish between Mandarin and Cantonese based on subtitles alone, unless you parse the grammar of the sentences or look for Cantonese specific characters.
• solardev 3y ago
  Mmm... I think there's a danger here. The example "coup de grâce", for example, should be pronounced with the final "s" sound. Otherwise it sounds like "coup de gras", ("strike of fat" instead of "strike of mercy"). But the YouTube videos accidentally leave out the final S. Maybe it's a Britishism? I dunno. Wiktionary calls this a "hyperforeignism", and if you just copy the YouTube videos, you'd never know the difference... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coup_de_gr%C3%A2ce https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coup_de_gr%C3%A2ce https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ngpq7m/psa_youre_probably_pronouncing_the_rune_coup_de/ https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ngpq7m/psa... https://www.dictionary.com/browse/coup%20de%20grace https://www.dictionary.com/browse/coup%20de%20grace
  • benatkin 3y ago
    Usually it's for the better. The second most populous country that's located in two different continents and doesn't have more than 10% of its population on islands should not be called Turkey (I said Pavo to because I mistakenly thought it was translated like that to Spanish, and meant to emphasize that it was called Turkey which also means the bird). I also don't mind if I don't hear the word "Cocoa" much anymore (thanks Apple for retiring it - this isn't exactly retired but is partly superseded by SwiftUI and UIKit).
    • solardev 3y ago
      > most populous country that's located in two continents should not be called Pavo I don't get this reference :( > Cocoa Co-co? Co-co-ah? What's right?
      • benatkin 3y ago
        (wrong: Turkiye/Turkey used to often be called the spanish word for Turkey.) (corrected for second most, as Russia is also in two continents, not sure it's correct) Cacao. Edit: it appears I was mistaken about Pavo, it was articles in Spanish about the official change in English name from Turkey to Turkiyé. On maps in Spanish I see a lot of other countries with spanish names that are quite different like Costa de Marfil instead of Ivory Coast and Países Bajos instead of Netherlands.
• ceautery 3y ago
  I'd like to see a collection of pronunciation blind-spots, where people mispronounce words in the same way. E.g., the extra "ar" syllable we put in "narrator", and Ohioans who pronounce Bellefontaine as "bell-fountain", as though it had a "u" in it somewhere.
• solumos 3y ago
  I'd love this for Spanish
  • Rendello 3y ago
    It has a bunch of languages hidden at the bottom, here's Spanish: https://youglish.com/spanish https://youglish.com/spanish
• hammock 3y ago
  Please dont... "YouTube voice," the narration style(s) that so many creators have picked up, is very annoying. It's worse than "newscaster voice." Edit: This is a cool tool though
  • queuebert 3y ago
    Is that where the speaker randomly pauses between words, as if they want to check that you're still watching?
    • askiiart 3y ago
      My guess is that it refers to the really "hype" voice that a lot of YouTubers use. Like Mr. Beast, and most Minecraft YouTubers (but usually not ones on Hermitcraft) (source: I've had to listen to my little brother watching Minecraft videos way too much).
      • sundarurfriend 3y ago
        It's interesting, all of us interpret it based on the YouTube bubbles we are familiar with: I first assumed they were referring to the "I have just figured out a secret, little child, and I'm deigning to share it with you" type voice that Johnny Harris and people making videos of that ilk put on. Then I thought maybe they were talking about the YouTube voice people like Connor (CDawgVA) and Ludwig put on, which is a mix of the "hype" voice you mention and a sort of 80s radio presenter voice. The conclusion is that there's no such thing as a "YouTube voice" that the GP comment mentions, it all depends on which bubble of YouTube you're familiar with and extrapolate to the whole of it.
        • queuebert 3y ago
          It may also be just how youngsters talk nowadays, because my teenager's friends have the YouTube voice. (Or maybe their excessive YT consumption is affecting their speaking style.)
  • modeless 3y ago
• coolmitch 3y ago
  small plug for a similar site, https://filmot.com https://filmot.com, which will search for a particular word in subtitles https://filmot.com/search/coup%20de%20gras/1?channelID=&gridView=1 https://filmot.com/search/coup%20de%20gras/1?channelID=&grid... (hover a thumbnail to play) I've personally found it very useful for japanese learning
  • piyh 3y ago
    Having built a similar website focused on channel level search, I like reading these comments, having the same data as OP and filmot, and realizing they all hit different niches. I took the website down as "postgres is in fact not all you need", then life hit me, but I credit building it to getting me my current job.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• crazygringo 3y ago
  As a native speaker, YouGlish is invaluable if you have to do any audio recording or public speaking and want to make sure you pronounce less common names/places correctly. You can't find those in dictionaries, and Wikipedia is only sometimes helpful. It's also super-useful when you want to use words you've only ever seen in print, without an obvious pronunciation, and the dictionary gives multiple versions without any indication of who uses which ones. YouGlish can reveal whether the difference is regional, or whether one version is more used by academics or by the layperson, etc.
  • Rendello 3y ago
    It's good too if you're learning another language, as there's 20 languages supported at the bottom of the page. I'm personally excited by the fact I can search for Canadian French specifically
  • paulcole 3y ago
    Yes, this is a great tip. I use it constantly for prepping for interviewing candidates or first meetings with potential business partners. Getting somebody’s name right really starts conversations out well.
• spandextwins 3y ago
  Speak slowly and take your time. Grammar is important. Accents are acceptable.
• chrisandchips 3y ago
  its cool that it still works across all locales (US, UK) for words spelt differently between countries. E.G. searching “aluminum” still got both US and UK results, even though the later writes it “aluminium”.
• kebsup 3y ago
  What I've found interesting about learning pronunciation is how deliberate you can be about fixing it. A lot of people from Slavic countries tend to pronounce the "th" sound as "d" or "s", including me, but I've stopped doing that mistake literally right after an American pointed out that I do it.
  • williamdclt 3y ago
    And then hypercorrection happens, and you start saying “th” when it _was_ an “s”!
    • deadbeeves 3y ago
      Such as in?
      • williamdclt 3y ago
        > Such as in? Any word really, for example "smooth" can get hypercorrected to "thmooth". French people with a decent english tend to fall prey to hypercorrection, see for example Macron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ03xCX6Tdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ03xCX6Tdg
        • deadbeeves 3y ago
          Ah, my bad. I thought you were saying there were words where the "th" digraph stands for an "s" sound.
  • secondcoming 3y ago
    It's quite common in Ireland for 'th' to sound like 'd'. It's normally people from the countryside.
• lfkdev 3y ago
  I really do like this. Cool Idea!
• hiccuphippo 3y ago
  Neat. I usually use wordreference.com, but forvo.com has many more accents and some phrases. Just today I noticed how different the US and British pronunciations of Lieutenant are. The British one has an f sound in it, somehow. https://forvo.com/search/lieutenant/ https://forvo.com/search/lieutenant/
• m463 3y ago
  as a native english speaker, this helps with words like Schenectady too.
• aimon1 3y ago
  This is very helpful
• torcete 3y ago
  I will finally learn how to pronounce "prioritisation".
• CliffStoll 3y ago
  Fifty-five year old true story: I was dating a woman in Buffalo; we're both native speakers. She tells me to meet her at a place on "Gothee" Street, over in the Lovejoy district. I bike over to the east side of town, and search all over for Gothee Street. No luck. Ask a few locals - nada. Spend a half hour looking; eventually give up. Next morning, there's hell to pay. She waited an hour for me. What happened? "It's Goethe Street, stupid," she says" "G O E T H E" I had no idea of this super-local pronunciation -- I'd always pronounced the poet's name as "G uh - t uh" (Similar thing happened in a town near Rochester, New York: How do you pronounce Chili, NY ? You'd better say "Chy - Ly" unless you want to sound like a stranger.)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• avgcorrection 3y ago
  But why would I want to sound like a native? - English accent: monocle vibes - Australian accent: Crocodile Dundee (badass but I can’t embody that) - Standard American accent: incredible “twang” (sounds like all wovels are sent through a wah-wah pedal)
  • lacrimacida 3y ago
    If I were learning english again I’d aim for good enough pronunciation but with better diction. Plenty of native english speakers have horrible diction. When it comes to accents it’s more like something one is not aware that they posses but only notice in outsiders.
    • vintermann 3y ago
      I am aware of my accent, but getting e.g. vowel colours exactly right is just too much work for too little gain. What would be the advantage to matching a specific dialect exactly? I'm not a spy trying to pass as a native. On rare occasions that it matters, for instance for a play or for a song where people would notice a wrong accent, I can work to get it right on those particular words. It's a lot of work, but it's still easy compared to getting to the point where you do everything without thinking.
• Minor49er 3y ago
  Just for fun, I looked at how 20 different people pronounced MySQL. The results: "My Sequel": 12 "My Ess Kyoo El": 8 "My Squirrel": 0 I thought "My Sequel" would have something closer to 2/3rds of results rather than 1/2
  • bigstrat2003 3y ago
    I'm surprised it's the majority at all. It's so weird that people insert imaginary vowels to try to pronounce it as if it were a word.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      You save a syllable, but also the letters SQL are on the unpleasant side of pronunciation. Just like the word "askew" -- it's just not a nice mouthfeel with that particular sequence of sounds.
    • ufo 3y ago
      History plays a role here. It used to be called SEQUEL before it was renamed to SQL.
    • jcparkyn 3y ago
      I think there are two main reasons: - Early versions of SQL were actually called SEQUEL (Structured English QUEry Language). - Sequel is just much easier to say than SQL, especially within a sentence.
    • woobar 3y ago
      But you will insert even more vowels if you pronounce it as "My Ess Kyoo El". Same with HHMMV/Humvee.
  • jcparkyn 3y ago
    To be fair, 12/20 _is_ closer to 2/3 than 1/2.
    • Minor49er 3y ago
• anadalakra 3y ago
  As a non-native English speaker, the "randomness" of English pronunciation has been a source of frustration for me for many years. I realized there are two types of issues: 1. Some sounds in English don't exist in other languages and you have to learn them "from scratch". For example the "flap T" in butter. Or the particular American "r" (constrast it to the Spanish rolled r for instance). 2. Certain sounds I DID know how to make, but didn't know WHEN to make them because spelling is so unreliable. For example, a word like "color" has two "o" letters but neither of them makes an "ou" sound - in fact they make two distinct sounds. For these, I realized you just have to practice it until your mouth "remembers" how to pronounce the word differently (i.e. creates muscle memory). Youglish is great for fine-tuning specific words. I also recommend BoldVoice (disclaimer: I'm a cofounder). We were YC S21 and built the app to help non-native English speakers improve their pronunciation with videos from Hollywood speech coaches and instant feedback via speech recognition ML.
  • modeless 3y ago
    BoldVoice looks cool, are you planning other languages? Personally I'm learning Mandarin.
    • David_Axelrod 3y ago
      Software Engineer at Boldvoice here, also learning Mandarin. I've been told my Chinese accent is awful due in large part to misuse of tones and overemphasizing articles like 了. We'd love to build something for all languages but are focusing on just users learning english right now.
      • skykooler 3y ago
        Also interested if you ever expand to Mandarin!
    • anadalakra 3y ago
      Thanks! For now, we're laser-focused on English since it's the language that 1 billion people are learning (as non-native speakers). But we'd love to add more languages in the future, stay tuned!
• David_Axelrod 3y ago
  Youglish is a great tool and we often hear users reference using it. It's nice to have so many examples available for a given piece of text. What I think makes BoldVoice significantly better is the ability to get feedback on your specific utterances and have the app highlight what elements of a word might make it harder for a native English speaker to understand you. If you go the route of only using youtube/references, you're left in this gradient descent process where you're just guessing mouth movements until you get something that sounds like the reference.
• ufo 3y ago
  It's impressive how different it feels to jump right into the middle of videos vs starting from the beginning. Wadsworth's constant in action.
• atum47 3y ago
  I've been having one on one with my colleagues every week to exercise my pronunciation and the way i form my sentences. Other then that i used to record videos "explaining" the current project I'm working on. It helps a lot.
• gr__or 3y ago
  While I strive to hide my German accent, and regularly attempt making my various english accents more specific, I simultaneously hold that there is glory to European English, or, probably more importantly, for example Indian English. The site would feel more progressive if it included those.
  • lacrimacida 3y ago
    Is there a reason you want to hide your accent? I love varius accents and enjoy hearing different ones as long as the pronunciation isn’t too off that I have to make a super effort to communicate. I see accents as flavor or aroma to language.
    • vintermann 3y ago
      If someone speaks in an unexpected accent, even if it's an unambiguous and internally coherent accent so that it's perfectly possible to understand it it takes a few seconds for well-meaning natives to adjust to. It does get tiresome to have to repeat yourself. You want to at least get to the level that if you talk to someone, it registers as English immediately.
  • unmole 3y ago
    > I simultaneously hold that there is glory to European English, or, probably more importantly, for example Indian English. My Polish colleagues do seem to find Indian English accents easier to understand than Irish ones.
• raggi 3y ago
  One I've noticed growing a gap in recent years is "attribute" which when I used to know as having different pronunciations for the verb and the noun. The links given for different English dialects demonstrate a conflicted range, in line with growth of differing use I've seen generally propagating through, primarily Youtube. Language always changes, so perhaps it doesn't matter, but it seems like things like this might contribute as much as they solve.
• gerdesj 3y ago
  Arnold S .. ch ... war ... err big lad, ran California for a while is being interviewed by Graham Norton on BBC1 now. That's an Irish host on a chat show in the UK with the Governator, a Dame, a comedian and the host of the Repair Shop. Their accents cover quite a lot of ground but I doubt anyone who has a reasonable grasp of English as a foreign language would have any trouble understanding them.
• Koshkin 3y ago
  Problem is, you have to have a native speaker hear you say the words (in a sentence as well as standalone), and give you a feedback. Repeatedly, until you get it "right" (to the extent possible). Otherwise you won't get anywhere - unless you are an 8 year old kid, maybe.
  • vintermann 3y ago
    It depends on what accuracy you aim for. Most of aren't spies that have to 100% pass as natives of the county. It's still nice to pronounce e.g. place names that have irregular spellings (and that's common in lots of languages besides English).
• lwansbrough 3y ago
  Sometimes grammar can give away a non-native speaker, particularly: “Show me how it looks like.” The use of how here is hard to explain, but it’s wrong. It should be “what it looks like”. This is an instant giveaway usually. But even native English speakers have weird ways of saying things. One grammatical error I hear a lot in people from the Appalachia region is the “needs done” construction. Always sounds bizarre. ie. “This work needs done by tomorrow.” Also the positive “anymore” construction. ie. “You see that a lot anymore” (“these days”).
  • Name_Chawps 3y ago
    If people from a region are all doing it, it's not an error, it's a dialect.
    • lwansbrough 3y ago
      On the other hand, if most people aren’t doing it, you could also say it’s both an error and a dialect.
      • Name_Chawps 3y ago
        An idiolect, maybe
  • gniv 3y ago
    I've never heard that usage of "anymore". Interesting, reminds me of the French word "jamais", which can mean either never or ever, depending on context.
  • vintermann 3y ago
    That last one makes some poetic sense. There are the things you don't see a loot anymore, and the things you do see a lot anymore.
  • whelp_24 3y ago
    Are you sure it wasn't something more like "get the work that needs done, done by tomorrow."?
• totetsu 3y ago
  Does anyone remember the site where you could input a text and it would find movie clips of people saying all the words ? Like a video version of a magazine type ransom note?
• profsummergig 3y ago
  What I need is an app that would rate my pronunciation against some standard, give me pointers for improvement, and then rate my improvements, and so on.
• sva_ 3y ago
  https://youglish.com/pronounce/Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch/english https://youglish.com/pronounce/Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychw...? Disappointed on the first result: "I'm not going to try to pronounce". It seems the subs need not match up with what is actually said. The site is really smooth and great to use though. edit: was trying to look up pronunciation of the hill named Taumata­whakatangihanga­koauau­o­tamatea­turi­pukaka­piki­maunga­horo­nuku­pokai­whenua­ki­tana­tahu[0], and very surprisingly got the error "Sorry...your query is too long!". 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long_place_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long_place_names
• mattgruskin 3y ago
  Synecdoche: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-n1vGeVIXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-n1vGeVIXo
• defrost 3y ago
  This topic can induce Scooten Froody. * * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo
• Brajeshwar 3y ago
  Awesome. My kids will love this one. I signed up but I needed to have a password that is less than 20 characters, no special characters (only alpha numeric characters). I also had to prove that I'm a special robot every time I try to fix their password requirements, which they won't say until you make the mistakes. You should be able to do in about 4 tries at worst.
• zephrx1111 3y ago
  I’m not a native English speaker, but I can speak 4 languages. My previous manager always suggested me to take some English class when we had the 1:1. Once a day, I told him: I’m speaking English with you, is because I can speak English, but you can ONLY speak English.
  • secondcoming 3y ago
    I imagine he found it quite tedious that you told him that every day!
• rebryk 3y ago
  Youglish is cool! By the way, I am building “Grammarly for video calls” - you automatically receive feedback on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary after each call. https://getfluently.co https://getfluently.co
• pezo1919 3y ago
  I I try to type randomly without checking the prediction, I get 67-70%, if I check it, I can easily get it to 46-50%. It is really interesting.
• hota_mazi 3y ago
  First example I looked up got it wrong. It was "coup de grâce". The video pronounces it "coup de grah", like many other English speaking people, whereas you need to pronounce the final "s" sound: "coup de grass".
• gniv 3y ago
  Nice that it works in other languages too. It seems useful for finding how words/expressions are used in real conversations. I don't care much about pronunciation, but I want to find context for the (French) words I run into. I am learning French and I use a website with a similar idea: https://www.linguee.fr https://www.linguee.fr. It lets you search for usage of words and shows them in professionally translated context. PS. Just realized the '...' icon on the transcript frame opens another frame with a scrolling transcript. Very neat!
  • alex-moon 3y ago
    +1 for linguee.fr which I used extensively while I was doing my DELF B2. Unimaginably useful way to learn how words are actually used, not just grammatically but in what kinds of sentences, what's the connotative value of the word, what kind of mood does it imply. I imagine Youglish is useful for this too.
  • Tade0 3y ago
    I used to be able to use Google for that (at least for written speech), but results have been decreasing in quality for the past few years.
• ak39 3y ago
  Nice! Finally: https://youglish.com/pronounce/been/english https://youglish.com/pronounce/been/english? "Been" pronounced "bin" is slowly moving to "ben" (mostly in the US usage).
• alex-moon 3y ago
  I think this is a brilliant idea and is no doubt useful for discovering variations in pronunciation as well. The first thing I tested it with was "mischievous" which notoriously has a correct - "MIS-chu-vus" - as well as an "incorrect" but very common pronunciation - "mis-CHEE-vee-us" - both of which are represented.
• alberto_ol 3y ago
  Previous submissions, the first one 4 years ago with 236 comments https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fyouglish.com%2F https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fyouglish.com%2F
• mgaunard 3y ago
  s/English/American English/g
• Tade0 3y ago
  This is very useful. My biggest problem, as a non-native English speaker, is figuring out when to use a hard and when a soft "g". Example: https://youglish.com/pronounce/gif/english https://youglish.com/pronounce/gif/english
  • account42 3y ago
    This is a bad example because the pronounciation of gif is arbitrary and there is no commonly accepted correct one.
• lemper 3y ago
  I actually, without any speck of joke, want to speak english with redneck accent or texan. example of i18n with redneck as target: https://web.archive.org/web/20120307132029/http://www.ninesys.com/fun/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120307132029/http://www.ninesy...
• victorbjorklund 3y ago
  Very nice!
• ranting-moth 3y ago
  Within the UK, you get a whole range of "randomness" (accents). Try listening to this without reading the subtitles for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQGwe2b18UA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQGwe2b18UA It even causes funny problems within the UK. Even in high places like the parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA
• zac23or 3y ago
  The problem is... the English accents are endless! I gave up on improving my understanding of English after watching a video of the Liverpool English accent... at some point the girl uses the R sound instead of the K sound. https://youtu.be/R_C4PDSfQJA?t=173 https://youtu.be/R_C4PDSfQJA?t=173 I finally accepted: There are people who have super clear pronunciation, you know. Some accents are impossible to understand immediately, but with some time you will understand. Some you will never understand! And some media you can understand clearly, but in some cases (Nolan disciples?) the sound is so bad that native speakers don't understand! Captions are your best friends.
• kaon123 3y ago
  Looking for Tomato (recommended you do this) US: Tomaydo UK: Toma`o AUS: Tomahto I feel the aussies got this one right.
• sbuttgereit 3y ago
  Related, but admittedly a bit only indirectly related, I can't recommend the YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey enough. I never thought I could be so engrossed about minute details in the spoken word, yet I don't ever find myself bored watching these videos on the quirks of English pronunciation. Here's a recent video about how to convey differences in the English pronunciations of words such as "fit" and "feet", especially as it relates to native French speakers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNpbv7hJf6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNpbv7hJf6c
• penguin_booze 3y ago
  There's English, and a there's bootlegged version thereof, called American. Be mindful which one you learn. Like, you can skejool to buy some aluminum off of the dude inside of the building. Like. /s
• matt-attack 3y ago
  Geez I hope that non-natives don’t use this example for courage. https://youglish.com/pronounce/courage/english https://youglish.com/pronounce/courage/english It was the first example I clicked on and it’s clearly someone else speaking that word with her own accent.
  • ragazzina 3y ago
    As a non-native, the fourth video is the weirdest one, much more different than the others, including the first. Sounds like "coureege".
• grassmudhorse 3y ago
  feedback: - I want to repeat just the word, lots of times, without waiting, so a "rapid repeat" button would be nice. - Context is good, but the player keeps going, well beyond the initial useful section. My attention span struggles with this. - I want it for Chinese!!! I would pay for this. Great app, thanks!
• udev 3y ago
  Examples of why French is hard: https://youglish.com/pronounce/tous/french https://youglish.com/pronounce/tous/french? https://youglish.com/pronounce/dix/french https://youglish.com/pronounce/dix/french? Still very nice tool!