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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 typ
by 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 agoBoldVoice looks cool, are you planning other languages? Personally I'm learning Mandarin.
- David_Axelrod 3y agoSoftware 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 agoAlso interested if you ever expand to Mandarin!
- anadalakra 3y agoThanks! 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!
- throwaway447 3y agohttps://www.viki.com/categories/country/mainland-china/genre/all https://www.viki.com/categories/country/mainland-china/genre...
- modeless 3y agoHaha there's one about a "genius programmer", maybe not a terrible idea for listening practice.
- throwaway447 3y agoDude, I am not sure you will still read this. Viki has changed: https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/articles/17924295071251-Sunsetting-of-Learn-Mode-Feature https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/articles/17924295071251-Su... What a clusterfuck. This may be a better option now: https://www.iq.com/ https://www.iq.com/
- modeless 3y agoOh bummer, what was it like?
- throwaway447 3y agoDifficult to explain. As far as I remember it always showed the CN subtitles and you could with your mouse always see the translation and the meaning of the single characters. viki and iq are around 5 USD a months so it could still be worth it. This plug in is supposed to work well with Netflix: https://www.languagereactor.com/ https://www.languagereactor.com/ Netflix is 12 USD or something. I am just out of prison and I have zero money and currently this is out of my reach. But it may work well for you. BTW, try this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7180392/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7180392/
- woobar 3y agoI can't find any pricing information on your website. Even FAQ tab labeled "Pricing" has zero info. Do I have to signup to find out? [1] https://www.boldvoice.com/frequently-asked-questions https://www.boldvoice.com/frequently-asked-questions
- anadalakra 3y agoHey, thanks for your interest in checking out the app :) Weird that you don't see the Pricing info on that page - did you tap "Pricing" at the top bar, and then tap the first question "How much does BoldVoice cost?" Either way, the app costs $150/year or $25/month (or your local equivalent). We have a free 7-day trial so you can try it before you commit.
- guu 3y agoThere's a bug on the page. If your screen width is wider than portrait tablet size the first question is not rendered.
- anadalakra 3y agoOh, you're right! Fixed it, thanks!
- Dfiesl 3y agoA word of note: In British English "color" is spelt "colour"
- anadalakra 3y agoI'm based in the US, where it's spelled without the "u". Quite a few examples of this spelling difference - humo(u)r, behavio(u)r etc. Oh and "spelt" is "spelled". Isn't English fun! :)
- stouset 3y agoEven weirder, as a Native American English speaker, I would have spelt that word this way in only this context, but in other contexts it’s spelled this way. Maybe this is my own idiosyncrasy though and not what others would do. I’ve never even thought about it until just now.
- sundarurfriend 3y ago> as a Native American English speaker Based on context, I assume you mean a native "American English" speaker, rather than a "Native American" English speaker :)
- gizajob 3y agoIt cold be a real labour if yo’re not used to it.
- MongoTheMad 3y agoYour missed u from you're and could merged into labor. :thumbs_up:
- EE84M3i 3y agoIt took me until I was 30 to learn that Brits spell enroll as enrol.
- 3y ago
- technothrasher 3y ago> Or the particular American "r" I'm a native English speaker and I also have trouble with the American ah. I grew up near Boston.
- anadalakra 3y agoHaha, you'd be surprised how many Bostonians we have on our app exactly for this, although we made this for ESL speakers...
- mananaysiempre 3y agoTried BoldVoice right now and almost immediately hit a bit of interpolation awkwardness: “Tomorrow, we’ll work on Practice your consonant skills”. Usually I wouldn’t complain about this sort of thing, but in a language learning app it seems out of place. Learners can be really trusting at the most unfortunate times. (Mozilla’s Project Fluent[1] was built to handle these situations in a localization setting, but you can probably get away with something much simpler.) Seems really slick otherwise. Now if only I could take a placement test so I could justify paying for it... But I appreciate that most—possibly literally all—of your target audience are not me. ETA: Also I just clicked on the site logo on /frequently-asked-questions and got pointed to /old-home-2, which is a 404. I swear I don’t seek out bugs, they come to me all by themselves :) [1] https://projectfluent.org/ https://projectfluent.org/
- anadalakra 3y agoOops, that's literally the name of one of our lessons "Practice your consonant skills" hence the awkward string, but I see what you mean. We'll look into handling those more elegantly because I agree, for English learners everything needs to be in perfect English. And we have a placement test -- it's in the Resources tab, under "Assessment". Lmk how it works for you! Re: 404... don't know what you're talking about ;)
- Gabriel54 3y agoOr, if you are from New York / New Jersey, the correct pronunciation is 'budder'. :)
- anadalakra 3y agoYep, exactly! That's called a "flap T/D" in linguistics.
- hughdbrown 3y agoAs a Canadian living in the US, this is the bane of my existence. The disappearance of Ts from so many words and phrases irks me: - bouny hunner - innerview - alannic ciddy - Rocky Mounins - haunid house - udderly - budder (the bagel topping) - winner (the season) - bidder (the taste) - invennive - annie-American - bedder - odder (the cute wadder mammal) The inventive ways that Ts are dropped in favor of: - Ns - Ds - glottal stops - nothing at all are legion. I've mused about publishing a compilation of these words with dropped Ts, but it's hit-or-miss whether the other person in America who cares would buy the book.
- DontchaKnowit 3y agoFwiw this was highly amusing to read. All of these I read in isolation and thought "no I pronounce the t there" then said in a sentance and yeah... youre dead on
- dragonwriter 3y ago> I've mused about publishing a compilation of these words with dropped Ts, but it's hit-or-miss whether the other person in America who cares would buy the book. There are probably more people than that that care, but most of them would probably prefer something more like the broad description of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Engl... rather than a catalog of words exhibiting one (or, rather, parts of a couple, related vy the starting sound) of the listed consonant shifts.
- 3y ago
- gizajob 3y agoTry googling the English word “ghoti”
- yhager 3y agoThere is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have. There are many English dialects, and sounds (and meanings) vary, A LOT. It's up to you whether you want to try and assimilate the local dialect of where you live right now, or you want to simply understand and be understood. There are many non-native speakers who are extremely easy to understand, even though it is clear that English is their second (or third) language. I believe the hardest part is to learn how to make sounds that do not exist in your native language (both consonants and vowels). But the good news is that there are ways to learn that. The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice. The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound. So trying to make the sounds out of the letters will always be a frustrating endeavor, as there will never be a single rule you can follow.
- bongobingo1 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_the_Spanish_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_th... I had no idea this would exist. I guess it makes sense that people would try to do something like this, but also, to my English addled brain, not much sense to expend the effort.
- yhager 3y agoOh, it's a huge effort! These bodies meet and discuss what the proper spelling of words should be, or they make up new words, and then they publish those guidelines for journalists, authors, and anyone who wants to speak "properly" to follow. It gives the language a good balance between spelling and pronouncing - that's why you can pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written (I think there are very very few exceptions, if at all). But this comes at a price of losing ability to track meaning some times. Sometimes it is not going so well, for example, look at the tumultuous German reform of 1996.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1...
- JonathonW 3y agoDon't worry; English pronunciation can be mastered simply through tough, thorough thought. (English "o" is tons of fun-- of the 22 vowel sounds listed on the English orthography page on Wikipedia, only two can't generally have the letter "o" involved.)
- cmehdy 3y agoThe Chaos (1922) - http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html More than half of my life lived in English-speaking countries does not help quite enough to avoid a migraine with this one.
- filterfish 3y agoThat's fantastic!
- looping8 3y agoI have seen similar joke poems but this one was too much for me. I even saw words I never heard of before, like "sward". For anyone like me - it's a lawn or a meadow.
- teddyh 3y agoComplete version as originally published in 1920: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos>
- thfuran 3y ago>Made has not the sound of bade Doesn't it though?
- pja 3y agoI think you might argue that the a in bade is stressed whereas the a in made is unstressed? Otherwise I agree, there’s no difference between the two in my dialect. Wiktionary suggests that it can be a homophone with bad in some dialects though, so perhaps that’s what the author was thinking of?
- russdill 3y agoAs a native English speaker, I love videos that point out all the details I never think about but must be maddening for non-native speakers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BYmA5V5Cyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BYmA5V5Cyg
- globular-toast 3y agoWe get annoyed about having to learn genders of words in other languages. It's just so silly! Then you remember that millions of children pick it up every day. Nothing in language can actually be hard. It just takes enough practice to start thinking like a native. But note I said practice, not repetition. You have to want to do it correctly. If you have an ear for correctness you will get there.
- crashmat 3y agoNative children spend thousands of hours learning language. Just because a child can do it through some of the greatest effort of their lives at that point doesn't make it easy surely?
- globular-toast 3y agoI definitely didn't mean to say learning languages as an adult is easy because children do it. I've always thought methods like Rosetta Stone are complete crap because, as you say, we don't have thousands of hours to put into this like children do. But what we do have is the most powerful tool we know for learning: language! Adults use their already acquired language to make learning a new language easier. What I really meant, though, is there's nothing fundamentally "hard" about most things in everyday language. Being "hard" is quite hard (heh) to define but some things are intuitively hard, for example, playing Stravinsky's Petrouchka is always going to be considered a remarkable achievement for a piano player. But natural languages aren't like this. They are almost by definition easy because they are natural. If it was hard people would figure out an easier way to talk.
- radicalbyte 3y ago> word like "color" has two "o" letters but neither of them makes an "ou" sound That it why we spell it as "colour" in English. Americans removed the "u" from their dialect which makes a needlessly complicated language even more so. Learning Dutch really opened my eyes as to how terrible English is as a written language. The funny thing is that it's mirrored in our law - English law is all about case law and president. We don't even have a formal written constitution.
- jdhzzz 3y agoIt's explained in this SNL sketch "Washington's dream": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk&t=1s
- radicalbyte 3y agoAmazing sketch
- loevborg 3y agoWhat? No, it's spelled "colour" because it comes from French, not to help make pronunciation easier.
- Amezarak 3y agoThis is completely incorrect. "Color" was spelled "color" in England throughout its history. "Colour" was a later variant that came along later and existed alongside "color" for many years. America eventually standardized on the "color" variant and the UK standardized on the "colour" variant. If you have any doubts about this, you can search on books.google.com for +"color" and look through books published in the UK to see that this is the case. For example, here is a book published in 1756 printed in London by an Irishman in which he consistently uses "color": https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Essay_on_Waters/UWtbAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Essay_on_Waters/UWtb... You can find many other things of interest in here, like the use of the medial s, which only died out in the mid 1800s and makes reading old texts very annoying. It's important to remember that for centuries in English, there was no such thing as standardized spelling. You spelled it how you felt it should be spelled. This extended even to people's own names. This didn't really change until the late 1700s-1800s. Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin "color" via the Old French "color."
- sershe 3y agoThe main issue really is that there are no rules for pronunciation. It's not as bad as reading Chinese (as far as I understand - I tried to learn for a month and gave up :)), but in the same direction going from a language like Turkish or Spanish that are mostly WYSIWYG - the glyphs in the word don't actually tell you how to pronounce it properly. My all time favorites are the words that are literally spelled the the same but pronounced differently, for no reason - like "wind". Or, similar but again pronounced differently - thought, through, though, tough - why are these like that? No (good) reason. And names, too. Worcester, guess how that's pronounced? :)
- anadalakra 3y agoThere are some rules in English pronunciation, but there are a ton of exceptions and inconsistencies. To give you an example of a reliable rule: when a plural word ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant, the "s" is pronounced as "z" (eyes, dogs), but when it ends in an unvoiced consonant, it's pronounced as "s" (cats). Our BoldVoice, we like to teach these rules because they are quick wins for most people. Then, a lot of the hard work comes in practicing and memorizing the many, many exceptions.