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.
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.
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.
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.
That site appears to violate the attribution requirements for the recordings they're using. https://tatoeba.org is mentioned in the attribution section, but the individual contributor of each audio file is not identified.
I sent the owner an email asking for attribution to be added. I guess suspending the site is the correct action to take in response to a DMCA complaint, although I'm not sure my email qualifies as one. (It's not infringing my copyright after all.) It appears to have been a useful service for quite a few people, so I hope he puts it back up with the appropriate attribution.
Also televangelists. They have an unusual way of enunciating. Reminds me of a road trip with my father through the US. He was listening to an evangelist on the radio and I asked him why. (He's an athiest.) He answered along the lines of "just listen to the beauty of that voice!". He felt the same way about Gospel music. Left an impression.
Long car trips are weird and lonely enough that you can listen to anyone speaking out loud and you just feel a little less lonely no matter what. I think this was the premise of Art Bell's entire career.
Seconded. I still can't tell apart the first a's in Ratte vs Rathaus, and Germans assure me they're different and the difference breaks any attempts to make puns based on the two (Rathaus=city hall, but to my ear feels like Ratte-house/haus).
As a German I can assure you that both "a" in Ratte and Rathaus sound the same. The "a" in Rathaus is just spoken a bit longer and the following "t" is hardly pronounced, whereas the "a" in Ratte is spoken very short and the "t" is pronounced strongly. I hope that helps.
The two vowel lengths sound too different to me (native speaker) for this to really work. The difference is the difference between aː vs a in IPA. I'm struggling to find a similar vowel length example in English and Wikipedia only has examples with an Australian accent. :)
Yeah, it doesn't really exist in English. I'd even argue that the Australian pronunciation doesn't change the vowel length as much as it adds a chain shift [1] (similar to the Canadian/Algonquin "ou" pronunciation).
It's one of the most difficult things to pick up when learning Japanese as well. There are lots of words that are basically homophones except for vowel length and tone. To an English speaker they tend to sound identical, but to a Japanese speaker if you get it wrong the result is unintelligible. For example "地図" (in romaji: chizu and pronounce cheezu with a short "ee") is "map" and "チーズ" (in romaji: chiizu and pronounced cheezu with a long "ee") is "cheese" (though they have the same tones... I'm struggling to think of an example with different tones as well as vowel length).
The thing that helped me the most for this was singing songs. Once you understand that there is a necessary rhythm to the words, it makes it much easier to use that rhythm in speaking. Or at least it did for me -- YMMV.
Even if it's not really a vowel length change in Australian English, I'm pretty confident it is in South African English (as spoken by me and many others). Ferry/fairy are distinguished by vowel length only.
I.e., they have the same quality but different quantity, and German does distinguish vowels by length, so they are different sounds in the sense that two words that otherwise sound the same can be distinguished by vowel length. "Ratten" and "raten", for a relavent example, are not homophones and nor are "Massen" and "Maßen" (German learners might be frustrated to learn that in fact these two are opposites in some contexts).
A few remarks on methodology in linguistics (the science).
A phone is a class of sounds (as opposed to their instances which are all unique) that can be reliably described by articulatory or acoustic features (phonetics) or by patterns found in EEG (I'm thinking of MIT's voiceless mic).
A phoneme is another type of "sound" class used in linguistics and it is arguably the more important: phonemes, as studied in the context of a particular language, is the finite set of sounds (a few dozens at most) from which you build different words in that language. Phonemes always come in pairs, since they are defined as the minimal distinctive linguistic unit that can yield a difference in meaning.
Substitute /p/ with /f/ in/fear/ and you get /pear/, i.e. another word, a difference in meaning --> thus /p/ and /f/ are phonemes.
But substitute /r/ with /rrrrr/ in /Braveheart/ and you get the same word but with a scottish accent. These do not form a phonemic pair but allophonic variations of the same phoneme (here according to different geographic areas but they can also vary according to age, social status, gender, etc ...)
By 'non-English speaker' do you mean 'someone with English as a second language', 'someone not speaking English', or 'someone not from England'?
I'm a non-native English speaker, and certainly has no problem distinguishing between your examples; in fact I use such words as illustration when explaining subtleties of Danish pronunciation to anglophones.
And I absolutely cringe whenever '2' is used for 'to', og '4' for 'for'. Just stop it, they sound nothing alike.
And I absolutely cringe whenever '2' is used for 'to', og '4' for 'for'. Just stop it, they sound nothing alike.
I'm a native english speaker, and I pronounce those the same.
Two = to = too, but "tool" sometimes nearly has 2 "o" sounds, depending. For = four, and the sound in "four" is not the same as in "foul", which is two sounds.
When I was a kid I found it confusing people would confuse there, their and they're – or rather being taught that people confuse them. I'm not sure whether it was due to me being more literate than verbal or not but "they're" at least has always been distinct to me. Maybe it's due to accent changes. I used to pronounce bull and ball the same.
Well, by my native language's customs (Finnish), they'd be spelled "Ratte" and "Raathaus", which maybe makes the difference clearer. Same wovel sound, different length.
This one is interesting to me because I can hear (and speak) the difference but it's something I would have never thought of on my own. I think, that the difference here isn't in the vowel `-a-` but more on how the first syllable `rat-(/ratt-)` is stressed in Ratte vs Rathaus.
Bare in mind I'm not a Linguist, but my take on this is that the word Ratte just flows out of my mouth under one breath. The second syllable is is made without needing to "stop my voice" if that makes sense… I just move my tongue up to the top of my mouth to make a small `-t-` sound. Ratte is pronounced very quick.
Rathaus, on the other hand, there is a something like a full stop (but not really a full and total silence) in between `Rat-` and `-Haus`. And for whatever reason, it seems like I pronounce the `-a-` in Rathaus longer than I do in Ratte.
Not me. Rural was particularly bad and is a terribly difficult word for non-indo-european speakers. The video (I found this in a few words) starts RIGHT on the word (autocracy did this as well). Most of the time this doesn't happen though. I did wish it would default to a specific pronunciation too. Default to US or UK when selecting "All". Router I got UK, Aluminum I got US. Epoch I got (it says US) some weird bastardization of US and UK[0] (though with ML becoming really popular it seems that everyone is defaulting to the UK pronunciation - probably because the spelling - so maybe this should default to UK?).
There also seems to be a bias for Ted Talks. I definitely agree with the parent's point about how speeches are different. But I'm not sure that's necessarily bad. The intonation changes people make when in speeches/talks is one of over pronunciation rather than the under pronunciation that we do in everyday speak. This may be better for learning. Maybe both could exist though. A "proper" and "casual" one. I'd say the casual should bias towards things like videoblogers and probably twitch streamers would be a good/plentiful resource. Might want to filter some of the latter though (stick to good streamers and big things like GDQ). Sports events would also be a good one.
That being said I'm not trying to discourage this effort and honestly I really like it (and wish there was one for Chinese, is there?). English isn't easy and there are a lot of pronunciations (I picked out words that are edge cases). I have already recommended it to a friend.
Good job!
Edit: Friend (native Chinese) already knew about this (extra good job!)
[0] How it should sound https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epoch (You can now tell all your ML friends that they are saying it wrong and win that great sense of superiority. Never mind that language is what is spoken, the dictionary is always right!)
That's a fair point (force of habit). But I did get UK when I clicked UK. Interestingly when I put in "colour" or "favouritie" I get different videos than the respective pronunciations for "color" and "favorite"
It's "aluminum" in American English but also in Canadian English.
Canada retains UK and French-influenced spellings for quite a few other English words which America doesn't (e.g. centre & colour). But apparently North America agrees on how to spell and pronounce atomic element 13 in English.
I'm a native English speaker and "rural" is a genuinely weird word to pronounce. My pronunciation is halfway between "earl" with a leading "r" and just incoherently growling "rrrl".
I was thinking the same thing - I realized that when I say this word, it is always slurred. Your pronunciation is much like mine, and I'm not even sure it would sound correctly if it were different as it would put too much emphasis on the middle "r".
However, I'm sure there is a name for that "there but not there" letter.
I don't think so, as both "r"s are sounded (like at the start of a word in a non-rhotic accent). It's when the "r" is at the end of a sound that there's a difference: "are", "our", "letter", "arctic", "architecture", etc. (none of those "r"s are sounded in my non-rhotic New Zealand accent, edit: unless followed by a vowel sound, like "letter and").
US dialects have a big impact on the second "r". I'm not a linguist, and I'm terrible with the terminology. The proper pronunciation is to sound both /r/ in the same manner. Southern dialects probably won't, but it would be to different degree. Some Southerners would "slur" the second /r/ for something akin to /roo'-rəl/: two syllables, schwa in 2nd syllable, but the second /r/ is barely there. I don't know if there's a way to specify that in a pronunciation key. This is how I'd say it in casual conversation. I imagine that native speakers of languages without /r/ would probably miss the 2nd /r/ with this pronunciation.
Other Southerners with thicker accents would run it together like /roo'-əl/: two syllaables, schwa in the 2nd, no perceivable 2nd /r/.
There may even be a 3rd way: /rulr/ rhymes with earl.
In terms of "correctness", the 2nd /r/ should always be there. There are so many flavors of English in the US with minor differences. Much like England, you can head 30 miles in a different direction, and you might find a group of people who speak markedly different than you.
My German really isn't up to scratch, but orthograpically/phonetically it is by far the most straightforward and consistent language that I know of. Those compound words may take some time to pick apart, but once you've done, their pronunciation is generally unambiguous.
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.
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.
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.
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].
So you would also recommend watching Archer and H. Jon Benjamin animated series? (Bob's Burgers) I'd certainly recommend them though I'm not sure he's a canonical example of the language.
By watching Archer you might also perhaps, better understand when things are phrased inappropriately?
He isn't. The archer writers are. The Bobs Burger's writers are not. It isn't about sound or accent. It is about language. Bob will slur his words slight, and uses are much lower vocabulary. Archer does the opposite. The actor is a small part of that distinction.
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.
For starters one of them - Archer - is American, not British. And nobody is saying one language is better than the other, but certainly with these programs you won't pick up bad habits like using "hence why" or confusing "than" and "then" (which I see ALL the time here on HN).
It's not even a UK vs USA thing - for me (a Scot) I notice that large parts of southern England have appalling pronunciation ("fing" vs "thing", "bovver" instead of "bother", pronouncing "r" like "w" - see how the guy on the right pronounces "presentation" as "pwesentation", and "Ryzen" like "Wyzen" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP2QkBnRqko), and that's the most populous region so much of our TV would also be no-go for English learners.
You are just attaching prestige to some variants of the language over others. It just so happens that variants of English spoken by professional classes in the SE of England or NE USA are more prestigious (at least for some) than variants of English in a pub in Liverpool or Glasgow, but those other variants are not "wrong" and don't have "appalling pronunciation", they just have different pronunciation.
If there was a revolution and the residents of liverpool became the new ruling classes then pretty quickly that would be the "correct" variant and the queen's English would be the "appalling pronunciation".
>> You are just attaching prestige to some variants of the language over others.
Yes. This is about people wanting to improve their english. They have identified that their english is less than they deem acceptable. If you want to improve, you need something to aim for. So that does indeed mean putting one version over another.
I'm not sure if you read my comment right, it seems you have understood it exactly the wrong way round. I'm Scottish, saying that contrary to popular belief it is actually the south of England who make the most bizarre pronunciation choices in the UK
The guy in the video I linked is actually an excellent example of the "professional class", and should by conventional wisdom be the kind of pronunciation you should aim for ... but you'd be entirely wrong to do so.
Every word in the English language is a poorly pronounced version of some older word that preceded it. What makes some words as pronounced in the south of England bizarre or wrong?
Well the whole point of this is that someone was suggesting examples of good English, someone balked at the idea that British English should be considered "proper" and I suggested that this wasn't the intended point point and added that even supposedly highly regarded accents of British English might not be considered proper by someone from that same country. I don't think it's helpful in this context to shrug your shoulders and say that English is evolving so there's no good or bad examples of pronunciation.
As to why these sound wrong to me, I'm from an area that is looked down on accent-wise and is sort of the subject of ridicule (usually just for fun). Since I moved abroad and mix in pretty multi-cultural circles I've seen first-hand what non-native-English speakers have trouble understanding when they talk to an English-native speaker, and I've often reflected on what caused this. One thing that surprised me was how easily my fellow Scots have been understood and how much difficulty people had understanding the English, since I was always led to believe that we are the ones who talk incorrectly. And it was this that made me realise how their pronunciation can stray far from the supposedly correct one - I gave a couple of examples to demonstrate this. There are plenty more if you listen carefully. The "how do you pronounce..." part of the NY Times British & Irish accent quiz was really quite good at illustrating this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/britis... (door/poor, farm/palm, horse/hoarse from there are nice examples).
So yeh sure, nothing is "wrong" in English and all that - there's no central authority that should dictate this. But when it comes to accents and clarity not all is as it might seem at first blush.
I could never fully appropriate the Australian accent, but something more akin to British becomes non-determinate and easier on the ear (ref: how people prefer speech synthesis in a different English region to their own).
It kind of surprises me that more non-native English speakers don't do the same; I have worked with people who I've really struggled to understand. But I can't really tell them "can you please work on your accent", as much as I wish I could and I knew it would serve them well.
I agree there's an issue; "mispronounced" should be one of the feedback options. The third video for "especially" pronounces the word as "ekspecially".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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).
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.
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.
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.
It is fairly unusual for American not to Anglicise pronunciations so it seems to stand as odd one out. Then again you kept the original "correct" pronunciation of herb - it was British English that changed for some reason.
> It is fairly unusual for American not to Anglicise pronunciations
Anecdotal, but I think this is only true for French. For example, I think U.S. Americans (even those with no Latin American ethnic background) are much more likely to pronounce Spanish loanwords in a way that's closer to the original than Brits are.
If my anecdotal belief is correct, I suppose it's largely because of the very close contact between the U.K. and France on the one hand, and the U.S. and Latin America on the other.
I believe BEng distinguishes "fillet" (with a final t) from "filet" (without), the former having been borrowed from French when it still had a /t/ at the end, and the latter being a later re-borrowing (usually in phrases like filet mignon). Something like "filet of fish sandwich" comes across as a humourously fancy name for a pretty ordinary meal.
However, I'm American, and I anecdotally disagree that "nitch" is the only pronunciation. I exclusively use "neesh" and I regularly hear both pronunciations from other Americans.
Words which are derived or introduced from foreign languages (common in English) can have varying pronunciations. Some people tend to pronounce it close to how it sounds in the original language, others pronounce it with a more native English (be it American, Australian, British, etc.) accent. 'Croissant' 'Chic' 'Bouquet' 'Renaissance' etc.
Then other words which are more native English words (even if they have Latin, Old French, Greek or proto Germanic roots) will have regional variations.
For example 'Tuna' and 'Tuner' can have their pronunciations switched in some parts of the US.
I find it interesting that British English speakers are much more likely to pronounce the english sounding version rather than close to how it sounds in the original language.
For example, pretty much across the board I hear "filet" pronounced with the 't' in British English. But Americans almost always a silent 't' like the French.
Your comment led me to check: although there's just a few British persons saying filet, they all pronounce it the "English way", except when it precedes "mignon". Which makes sense, I guess.
If by "it exists", you mean that there are dialects in which those are the pronunciations of "piano tuner" and "tuna sandwich" then I'd like to know more, but I've met many people who speak dialects without the so-called intrusive R and don't understand how it works (but think they do). With intrusive R you get "tuner and mayo" but not "tuner sandwich".
GIF is another curiously undecided word. I'm also reminded of "gigawatt", which was widely mispronounced following "Back to the Future" in 1985, but is now generally pronounced correctly. I attribute the change to the introduction of gigabyte hard drives.
Where are you from? I have noticed that U.S. west coast seems to usually say "neesh" but I almost always hear "nitch" in the mid-west and south. Not sure about east coast.
I only heard the latter pronunciation fairly recently via a YouTuber, who would say "There are riches in nitches" as a mantra. At first, I put it down to a form of colloquialism and it took me a while to figure out, that he meant 'niches'.
The pronunciation of niche has to do with french not pronouncing ch differently from sh. This is somewhat problematic for french people pronouncing Asian words transliterated in Latin alphabets; they will consistently pronounce ch exactly like sh (« konishiwa », …) (Pikachu is mostly pronounced correctly though.)
The first four pronounce it like I think it is pronounced
then the following five pronounce it as "click"
(ignoring mis-subtitled cases of cliché and claque)
It doesn't seem to be consistent in either British or American pronunciations.
When you get inconsistent answers, there might be a deeper reason.
Banal was pronounced like anal, but people got embarassed sometime in the 20th century and started starting saying canal. I like anal.
Variations of indefatigable and preternatural are probably from people who have read it but never heard it pronounced (a. The funny/common example is hyperbole/hyperbolic. It's the stress that is most butchered, which cascades into vowels being pronounced differently. Heurstics in this matter can be internalized and improved.
Niche is one possible outcome of anglicization, which is complex and has different results, mostly depending on how common the word ends up. The more foreign-like (French) is neesh. The more anglicized is nich. Neither are worthy of ridicule (which usually comes from the ignorant, and is another topic altogether). Just avoid mixing the two: Never "neech" (like Nietchze) or "nish", which will make me laugh.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadNot 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://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/raison%20d'etre
Roughly 60 / 40 short u ('tupple') vs long u ('toople').
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.
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.
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.
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=...
Also works for languages other than German. ( https://tatoeba.org/eng/stats/sentences_by_language )
I assume this happened in the last 8 hours or so..
I think that's a plus, but it depends on your needs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length#Contrastive_vowel...
It's one of the most difficult things to pick up when learning Japanese as well. There are lots of words that are basically homophones except for vowel length and tone. To an English speaker they tend to sound identical, but to a Japanese speaker if you get it wrong the result is unintelligible. For example "地図" (in romaji: chizu and pronounce cheezu with a short "ee") is "map" and "チーズ" (in romaji: chiizu and pronounced cheezu with a long "ee") is "cheese" (though they have the same tones... I'm struggling to think of an example with different tones as well as vowel length).
The thing that helped me the most for this was singing songs. Once you understand that there is a necessary rhythm to the words, it makes it much easier to use that rhythm in speaking. Or at least it did for me -- YMMV.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shift
Itabashi Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itabashi_Station
Iidabashi_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iidabashi_Station
(the major difference you hear is the long ii, rather than the t/d difference)
A phone is a class of sounds (as opposed to their instances which are all unique) that can be reliably described by articulatory or acoustic features (phonetics) or by patterns found in EEG (I'm thinking of MIT's voiceless mic).
A phoneme is another type of "sound" class used in linguistics and it is arguably the more important: phonemes, as studied in the context of a particular language, is the finite set of sounds (a few dozens at most) from which you build different words in that language. Phonemes always come in pairs, since they are defined as the minimal distinctive linguistic unit that can yield a difference in meaning.
Substitute /p/ with /f/ in/fear/ and you get /pear/, i.e. another word, a difference in meaning --> thus /p/ and /f/ are phonemes.
But substitute /r/ with /rrrrr/ in /Braveheart/ and you get the same word but with a scottish accent. These do not form a phonemic pair but allophonic variations of the same phoneme (here according to different geographic areas but they can also vary according to age, social status, gender, etc ...)
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...
Or better yet: "Luke", "look", and "luck"
And for Spanish speakers there's "Jeep", "sheep" and "cheap"
I'm a non-native English speaker, and certainly has no problem distinguishing between your examples; in fact I use such words as illustration when explaining subtleties of Danish pronunciation to anglophones.
And I absolutely cringe whenever '2' is used for 'to', og '4' for 'for'. Just stop it, they sound nothing alike.
I'm a native english speaker, and I pronounce those the same.
Two = to = too, but "tool" sometimes nearly has 2 "o" sounds, depending. For = four, and the sound in "four" is not the same as in "foul", which is two sounds.
What's the concrete difference? Global rising or falling? Upsteps/downsteps? Pitch contours?
r/iamverysmart
Bare in mind I'm not a Linguist, but my take on this is that the word Ratte just flows out of my mouth under one breath. The second syllable is is made without needing to "stop my voice" if that makes sense… I just move my tongue up to the top of my mouth to make a small `-t-` sound. Ratte is pronounced very quick.
Rathaus, on the other hand, there is a something like a full stop (but not really a full and total silence) in between `Rat-` and `-Haus`. And for whatever reason, it seems like I pronounce the `-a-` in Rathaus longer than I do in Ratte.
There also seems to be a bias for Ted Talks. I definitely agree with the parent's point about how speeches are different. But I'm not sure that's necessarily bad. The intonation changes people make when in speeches/talks is one of over pronunciation rather than the under pronunciation that we do in everyday speak. This may be better for learning. Maybe both could exist though. A "proper" and "casual" one. I'd say the casual should bias towards things like videoblogers and probably twitch streamers would be a good/plentiful resource. Might want to filter some of the latter though (stick to good streamers and big things like GDQ). Sports events would also be a good one.
That being said I'm not trying to discourage this effort and honestly I really like it (and wish there was one for Chinese, is there?). English isn't easy and there are a lot of pronunciations (I picked out words that are edge cases). I have already recommended it to a friend.
Good job!
Edit: Friend (native Chinese) already knew about this (extra good job!)
[0] How it should sound https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epoch (You can now tell all your ML friends that they are saying it wrong and win that great sense of superiority. Never mind that language is what is spoken, the dictionary is always right!)
video it linked: https://youglish.com/getcid/19634402/epoch
Canada retains UK and French-influenced spellings for quite a few other English words which America doesn't (e.g. centre & colour). But apparently North America agrees on how to spell and pronounce atomic element 13 in English.
However, I'm sure there is a name for that "there but not there" letter.
Other Southerners with thicker accents would run it together like /roo'-əl/: two syllaables, schwa in the 2nd, no perceivable 2nd /r/.
There may even be a 3rd way: /rulr/ rhymes with earl.
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.
(vs https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rural and https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epoch)
By watching Archer you might also perhaps, better understand when things are phrased inappropriately?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg
No variety of any language is superior to another
It's not even a UK vs USA thing - for me (a Scot) I notice that large parts of southern England have appalling pronunciation ("fing" vs "thing", "bovver" instead of "bother", pronouncing "r" like "w" - see how the guy on the right pronounces "presentation" as "pwesentation", and "Ryzen" like "Wyzen" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP2QkBnRqko), and that's the most populous region so much of our TV would also be no-go for English learners.
If there was a revolution and the residents of liverpool became the new ruling classes then pretty quickly that would be the "correct" variant and the queen's English would be the "appalling pronunciation".
Yes. This is about people wanting to improve their english. They have identified that their english is less than they deem acceptable. If you want to improve, you need something to aim for. So that does indeed mean putting one version over another.
The guy in the video I linked is actually an excellent example of the "professional class", and should by conventional wisdom be the kind of pronunciation you should aim for ... but you'd be entirely wrong to do so.
As to why these sound wrong to me, I'm from an area that is looked down on accent-wise and is sort of the subject of ridicule (usually just for fun). Since I moved abroad and mix in pretty multi-cultural circles I've seen first-hand what non-native-English speakers have trouble understanding when they talk to an English-native speaker, and I've often reflected on what caused this. One thing that surprised me was how easily my fellow Scots have been understood and how much difficulty people had understanding the English, since I was always led to believe that we are the ones who talk incorrectly. And it was this that made me realise how their pronunciation can stray far from the supposedly correct one - I gave a couple of examples to demonstrate this. There are plenty more if you listen carefully. The "how do you pronounce..." part of the NY Times British & Irish accent quiz was really quite good at illustrating this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/britis... (door/poor, farm/palm, horse/hoarse from there are nice examples).
So yeh sure, nothing is "wrong" in English and all that - there's no central authority that should dictate this. But when it comes to accents and clarity not all is as it might seem at first blush.
Further to this, I've also worked on my diction using a number of available resources such as https://www.audible.com.au/search?keywords=get+rid+of+your+a... .
I could never fully appropriate the Australian accent, but something more akin to British becomes non-determinate and easier on the ear (ref: how people prefer speech synthesis in a different English region to their own).
It kind of surprises me that more non-native English speakers don't do the same; I have worked with people who I've really struggled to understand. But I can't really tell them "can you please work on your accent", as much as I wish I could and I knew it would serve them well.
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://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=478&v=Td2hfdXQ5x...
Love the site, though! Great work.
> (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
next features: 1) Find the videos that most agree with eachother and 2) Add other languages
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.
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.
Not in my experience. Where are you from?
> "Here are 4 tips that should help you perfect your pronunciation of 'February':
> Break 'February' down into sounds: [FEB] + [YUH] + [REE] ..."
Ugh!
But instead saw it as a reinforcement, that solely you have the exact right way to pronounce the word.
https://youglish.com/search/notre%20dame/all?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhPDprqB_c
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.
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'
It is from French after all.
Edit: American audiobooks on the other hand seem to go 100% with nitch for some unexplainable reason.
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'.
"so please welcome Herb Kim back to stage."
Even the poshest Brit will put the H in herb now.
Anecdotal, but I think this is only true for French. For example, I think U.S. Americans (even those with no Latin American ethnic background) are much more likely to pronounce Spanish loanwords in a way that's closer to the original than Brits are.
If my anecdotal belief is correct, I suppose it's largely because of the very close contact between the U.K. and France on the one hand, and the U.S. and Latin America on the other.
“Allo, allo, what ave we ere,” said the stereotypical constable.
And yet the British say "filet" with a hard 't'? I have never heard anything but the French pronunciation in the US.
Fillets or rounds are placed features that round off or cap interior or exterior corners or features of a part.
niche niːʃ nɪtʃ ǁ nɪtʃ — Preference poll, British English: niːʃ 95%, nɪtʃ 5%. In American English only nɪtʃ.
However, I'm American, and I anecdotally disagree that "nitch" is the only pronunciation. I exclusively use "neesh" and I regularly hear both pronunciations from other Americans.
Then other words which are more native English words (even if they have Latin, Old French, Greek or proto Germanic roots) will have regional variations.
For example 'Tuna' and 'Tuner' can have their pronunciations switched in some parts of the US.
For example, pretty much across the board I hear "filet" pronounced with the 't' in British English. But Americans almost always a silent 't' like the French.
Hearing 'piano \tuna\' and '\tuner\ sandwich' sounds different. It exists.
I’ve literally only ever heard one person saying nitch. And he was ridiculed for it.
So yeah, for me that pronouncitation seems fairly niche.
So to me it seems most mainstream, non-regional variants of English sticks to the obvious pronunciation.
And YouTube is not going to give you a very diverse sampling of English pronunciation.
Content creators for YouTube are heavily, heavily coastal. Mostly west coast.
I only heard the latter pronunciation fairly recently via a YouTuber, who would say "There are riches in nitches" as a mantra. At first, I put it down to a form of colloquialism and it took me a while to figure out, that he meant 'niches'.
Pretty sure it comes from French, so "neesh"
The first four pronounce it like I think it is pronounced then the following five pronounce it as "click" (ignoring mis-subtitled cases of cliché and claque)
It doesn't seem to be consistent in either British or American pronunciations.
I was going to say I pronounce it as if it were a French word,
but realistically it's more like I pronounce it as if you were learning high school French as taught in England.
Banal was pronounced like anal, but people got embarassed sometime in the 20th century and started starting saying canal. I like anal.
Variations of indefatigable and preternatural are probably from people who have read it but never heard it pronounced (a. The funny/common example is hyperbole/hyperbolic. It's the stress that is most butchered, which cascades into vowels being pronounced differently. Heurstics in this matter can be internalized and improved.
Niche is one possible outcome of anglicization, which is complex and has different results, mostly depending on how common the word ends up. The more foreign-like (French) is neesh. The more anglicized is nich. Neither are worthy of ridicule (which usually comes from the ignorant, and is another topic altogether). Just avoid mixing the two: Never "neech" (like Nietchze) or "nish", which will make me laugh.