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
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.
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.
There's a good reason for that: in English, a trailing e tends to be silent, but also to indicate that the previous vowel is different (long vs. short usually).
So, to an English speaker, "lupe" looks like LOOP, which is different from "lup" which would be LUPP. Those aren't real words of course, so some similar words with this effect might be "flute", "lute", and "glute". "flut" and "lut" aren't words AFAIK (but "flutter" is), but "glut" definitely is, and has the short-u vowel sound as opposed to the long-u that "glute" has.
The pronunciation rules in English aren't very good and are full of exceptions, but speakers are still just trying to apply the rules they know, based on other words they know, to foreign names.
I did not know it was a river in Spain, coming from the US I had always assumed it was some catholic religious phrase or a mispronunciation of a native word.
It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP" but I guess its not even that bad compared to many mispronunciations
I think it is not uncommon in the US for place names to take on a local pronunciation. It seems to become part of the local identity. For instance, Cairo (kay-roh) Illinois. The locals know how it is pronounced when referring to the city in Egypt, but they will correct you if you pronounce the name of their town that way.
I have always heard "GWAD-uh-LOOP-eh" or "GWAD-uh-LOOP-ay" around where I live but native spanish speakers elsewhere on this thread have said that "GWAD-uh-LOOP" is not that bad of a pronunciation so I imagine it is a highly regional thing.
It's a river, a town, a religious icon, a name in Spain and then, when conquistadores from the area went to Mexico, they named another town, another icon... Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is the patron saint of Mexico, so it's a big thing there.
That pronunciation is not so bad. Source: I'm a native Spanish speaker and dated a Guadalupe for years :)
> When the Saxons arrived and asked the Welsh the name of that hill, the Welsh said “pen” which means "hill" in Welsh. So the Saxons used their word for hill, “tor,” and called it Torpen (hill hill).
>
> Then the Norse arrived and the same process added the their world for hill “Haugr”. So now it was Torpen Haugr (Hill Hill Hill).
>
> Later, the English called it Torpenhow Hill (Hill Hill Hill Hill)
Turns out the rise near the village of Torpenhow isn't named Torpenhow Hill, but I digress... Here's a quick YT on it:
This is a fun hoax that was invented 70 years ago, in 1953. It was debunked at least 20 years ago, but it's still more popular than facts.
There is a Tarpenhow place in the UK, but it has no hill. So Tarpenhow hill does not exist. No mention of Norse either in the Oxford Concise Dictionary which describes the word as "Torr pen", top of the hill, from the Welsh "pen", and Old English "hoh", ridge.
there's a 3x hill name in Pilton, uk/ on the site of Glastonbury festival
"You see, in Welsh (Romano-British), PEN means hill. In a slightly different version of Gaelic (more common in Ireland and Scotland), ARD means hill. So, Pennard Hill is "Hill Hill Hill". For generation after generation, newcomers to the region have been referred to "that hill over there" - and completely failed to understand. A few more millennia, and the name may be longer than the hill. "
My favourite example of this sort of redundancy is the fact that there are numerous rivers in England called the River Avon. Avon is believed to come from the Proto-Brythonic word "aβon" [0], meaning "river".
Unless you are in my city, where it is Frome like home. It's probable the whole city is wrong, since the namesake is British, but no one will recognize a Froom street.
That's similar to the technique I sometime use when I hesitate between two spellings or expressions. I do a Google search of both, the one with the most results wins. There is a website called Googlefight that does that for you, but it doesn't seem to work anymore.
It may not be correct by the book (though it usually is), but it is what people use.
Language (especially spoken language, most especially English) doesn't really have a "right" or "wrong." It has "likely to be understood by receiver" and "unlikely to be understood by receiver."
The real correct answer to anyone's "what's the right way to say...?" question is a probability distribution.
Language do have right and wrong pronunciation and, in many cases, it is also tied to the script. e.g. in Hindi position of tongue, lips and sound from vocal cord is defined for every phoneme.
That's why games like spelling bee make no sense because if you can hear the word, you can write it there is no ambiguity. Some may pronounce words it differently, but they are mostly different dialects. Or in some cases it is accepted as wrong but common pronunciation.
other honorable mentions:
puyallup, washington (PYOO-al-ip)
koenig ln, austin, tx (KAY-nig) - though admittedly this one is likely originally german König, and what texan is going to pronounce German words like Germans? aqui bleiben wir with Stolz, y'all
I agree with you but nativised nouns are an edge case that you likely can never stamp out without a huge amount of context that would neuter any usefulness the tool has.
Like any tool for language learning its big limitation is the fact that it appears to be writing based.
Nah its pronounced nuclear. A lot of people mess it up but most people pronounce it correctly. Its sorta like library -> libary. Its a common mispronounciation but it is pretty universally recognized as wrong.
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.
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.
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.
That's a big part of immersion learning techniques, which even go as far as having you pick a "parent" to binge watch as you will naturally imitate their accent and cadence.
That's the theory there too, if you wamt to speak like a native, let your brain bathe in native speaking and it will be absorbing all the nuance that won't be in textbooks or classrooms.
When I first landed up in Austin, Texas that's what I look around the street and went hmmmm, perhaps, I need to learn a tad bit of Spanish -- at-least swear words.
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
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
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.
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.
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 :)
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:
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
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.
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 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)
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
my German accent only got less notable after speaking a ton of English living in English speaking countries for several years. For some reason losing the accent was way harder than getting rid of an accent in French.
Especially words like 'strength'. If German is your first language there is something about 'r' and 'th' sounds that's so hard to get right.
> but still have a noticeable German accent, never get any flak for that.
My experience of working with Germans in tech is that the accent is actually an asset. It's totally playing into a certain stereotype of all Germans being great engineers. "I mean...he is German...he must be smart!"
The problem I've had with Mandarin is keeping my accent means imparting tones to the words which could change their meaning. But I agree with your general point.
- If your accent is not noticable, people will assume you have native-like fluency, speak fast and use colloquialisms that you may have trouble understanding. Try to work on comprehension at least as much as accent.
- Everyone in the English-speaking world has an accent anyways. Californians don't speak like Texans, English don't speak like Scottish, there are people throughout the former Commonwealth that speak a version of English that is what "native" means in their country but sounds like acquired language to others.
- When speaking with people who lack fluency in comprehension, better to speak their language if you can, even if you struggle with it. They will have less trouble detecting your incorrect expression. Too often, people who lack fluency in comprehension are afraid to say they don't understand.
I.can often tell people who a fluent non native speakers because I can't figure out where they are from. Different areas have different accents and foreign learners end up with a very understandable accent that is an average that no native speaks.
All countries/languages have multiple accents. My mother was from Devon (and the forties!) and could make herself nigh on unintelligible to me and my brother and I lived in Plymouth (Devon) for eight years.
You are probably familiar with the generic south west of England accent - "aarr me hearties" and all that fake pirate bollocks. Now listen to the greatest Cockney who ever lived - Dick van Dyke - "Cor blimey Mary Poppins. Very different accents. If you drift up north, why not take a detour via Wales - several accents, quite noticeable when put side by side. The midlands has the Black country "yam yam" and Brummie, go east and there is a whole host of the bloody things. Carry on up and you got "eee bah gum" - Yorkshire and more - bear in mind that Yorkshire alone has a larger population than each of the other nations of the UK and is rather more diverse than even many Yorkies think. Lancs, Mancs and Cheshire, oh and don't forget Liverpudlean (find a recording of the Beatles speaking - they are from Liverpool). Nip on up through Geordie land and Cumbria (Cumbric has only recently died out as another Brythonic language). The Borders, where England and Scotland blur somewhat and the it gets a bit tartan flavoured.
Scotland manages to deploy a lot of accents for roughly 5.5M people. Glasgow and Edinburgh are distinguishable for me and they are only about 50 miles apart. There's Aberdeeeeeen and Perrrrrth and many more!
Over in Ireland (the island) there are several accents. The Dublin "brogue" is considered the easiest accent for a foreigner to understand, which is quite ironic. The Republic of Ireland is home to multiple accents as is Northern Ireland (UK).
The accent that D van D deploys in Mary Poppins is generally known as "Mockney" and that pirate thing is a variety of "Mummerset". Mummer is an old word for actor and Somerset is in the south west of England. This comment is getting lengthy, so I won't delve into Cockney rhyming slang, which is worth looking up if you fancy a right larf, me old septic 8)
In the English speaking world, high tolerance for accents does seem to be the norm. My experience is that there are also countries outside of it with a much stronger normative accent seen as the "right" way to speak the language.
Fellow good accent, poor grammar haver (but in Czech) - hello! I agree completely. In fact we are not alone, here’s a video where a YouTuber is praised for his use of English (including contemporary idioms etc) in comparison to someone who has a good accent but comparatively poor command of the language itself: https://youtu.be/-81TSnMUA68?si=4j4mxiSssnQIBVRq
Personally when it comes to speaking English I find a false American or English accent quite unnerving.
That's been my strategy for a long time and indeed it seems to pay off more than any of my other friends who have a perfect pronunciation but can hardly detect sarcasm or can't write a complex text
I will have to disagree here. I have a South Indian accent and a good grip on grammar, at least when I'm speaking, Most of the native English speakers I encountered had trouble understanding some of the words I was pronouncing even if it was within context.
My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.
I think what the GP means is that if you speak in grammatically correct sentences and are intelligible, people are less likely to complain or look down on you. I.e. that's a deliberate choice on the listener. If your pronunciation is so off that your listener can't understand you then that's something that's outside of their control; either they pretend to understand and go "uh-huh", or they have to ask you to repeat yourself.
>My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.
Nah. People get used to understand certain sequences of sounds and eventually get used to your particular accent, even if initially they had no idea what you were saying. One time I had to work with a Vietnamese woman (let's call her Anna) who said "transaction" like "trunsun" or something; definitely one syllable too few. After several months I was quite able to understand most of what she said, although occasionally I needed her teammate (Barbara) to translate for us. To restate GP's point, both Anna and Barbara spoke grammatically correct English and had definite East Asian accents, but Barbara pronounced things correctly and Anna didn't, so Barbara was easier to speak with, while when speaking with Anna I often had to ask her to repeat herself.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Interference doesn't matter if all you're doing is copying what people do with their mouths. You might have more or less trouble performing the movement at the mechanical level (for example a lot of people have trouble doing the French R) or listening for the precise positions of the tongue etc., but just copying what you can hear is trivial.
>Feel free to post a voice recording, so we can check.
Nah. I have no interest in convincing you; honestly accepting to be tested at all is probably more than I should have done. I'm merely relaying a personal experience for your edification. If you can't accept it for what it is then continue as you were.
Interference absolutely does matter. Interference manifests itself in the form of a foreign accent, which most people have when they speak a second language. You're making an extraordinary claim, namely that you're able to speak a second language without a foreign accent. I find your claim extremely unlikely to be true, especially since you provide no evidence and you've shown that you know very little about language acquisition.
"With correct pronunciation" and "without an accent" are not equivalent qualifiers. There's no such thing as the null accent. Obviously I will have an accent relative to any speaker, since I don't live in an English-speaking community and so I'm not copying the exact pronunciation of any single community, but rather approximately averaging the pronunciations of all the speakers I hear.
Like I said, I have no interest in convincing you. If you can't accept what I say for what it is, continue as you were.
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.
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.
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
It sounds too studied, almost a mockery of real native speakers, there's always too much of perfection in the way these learners speak that makes it sound uncanny
Interesting, yeah I can see that. A lot of modern language learning tries to get you to sound natural, but the question becomes, natural where? You start to delve into dialects, when I meet people who learned English naturally from TV and media, they often have a weird blend of dialects that constantly switches, it's kinda fun actually. One minute they have American inflections, next they're Australian etc.
When learning Japanese I was encouraged to pick a person with a dialect I prefer and listen to them a lot, as I'll likely pick up their accent and mannerisms.
> If it was actually perfect grammatical accuracy on their part they’d be saying “Who were you talking to” or “Who were you speaking to”.
There is a sizable contingent of English speakers out there that continue to insist that it’s incorrect to end a sentence in a preposition. (I am not part of this group and it is fortunately shrinking over time.)
I use English according to defined grammar rules. It marks me as upper middle class and therefore trustworthy in administrative professional positions, greatly improving my life outcomes compared to someone who is not able to do so.
RP itself has changed over time, as the wp article notes -- if you tried to speak RP of the 1950s you would definitely come across rather strangely today. Some of the arguments over naming the article mentions is I think a disagreement over whether RP should only refer to that upper class style of speech (and thus be a relatively rare accent today) or if it should be used as a name for what some people would label "Standard Southern British".
A great example of this is Sir David Attenborough. "Planet Earth III" has some excerpts from programmes he made when we all lived in greyscale and you can hear how his accent has changed quite noticeably through time.
Yes and no. I used to have a regional accent that was a soft mix of Lancashire and Yorkshire accents. I now work in south Worcestershire, and the local accent is pretty much modern RP. In adulthood, I softened my accent further towards RP to such an extent that people think I’m local.
What you are probably referring to is the ‘educated European twang’ that often remains when people are targeting the RP accent from 50 years ago.
"Estuary English" is the closest to the "default" there is today. RP is coded posh, Estuary is "vaguely from around London" without any particular colouring.
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!
340 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadMaybe 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.
Not saying it's right or wrong, but the two are different.
So, to an English speaker, "lupe" looks like LOOP, which is different from "lup" which would be LUPP. Those aren't real words of course, so some similar words with this effect might be "flute", "lute", and "glute". "flut" and "lut" aren't words AFAIK (but "flutter" is), but "glut" definitely is, and has the short-u vowel sound as opposed to the long-u that "glute" has.
The pronunciation rules in English aren't very good and are full of exceptions, but speakers are still just trying to apply the rules they know, based on other words they know, to foreign names.
And funny that I once ordered a sandwich in mexico, but they couldn't understand me until I pronounced it like san-doo-weee-ch
It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP" but I guess its not even that bad compared to many mispronunciations
What's the better/closer-to-original pronunciation?
That pronunciation is not so bad. Source: I'm a native Spanish speaker and dated a Guadalupe for years :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_(name)
- Divisadero: duh viz uh derro
- Arguello: are goo-ell o
- San Rafael: san ruff ell
- Tomales: tuh mal es
- Gough: gawff (not Spanish, but still surprising)
> When the Saxons arrived and asked the Welsh the name of that hill, the Welsh said “pen” which means "hill" in Welsh. So the Saxons used their word for hill, “tor,” and called it Torpen (hill hill). > > Then the Norse arrived and the same process added the their world for hill “Haugr”. So now it was Torpen Haugr (Hill Hill Hill). > > Later, the English called it Torpenhow Hill (Hill Hill Hill Hill)
Turns out the rise near the village of Torpenhow isn't named Torpenhow Hill, but I digress... Here's a quick YT on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo
There is a Tarpenhow place in the UK, but it has no hill. So Tarpenhow hill does not exist. No mention of Norse either in the Oxford Concise Dictionary which describes the word as "Torr pen", top of the hill, from the Welsh "pen", and Old English "hoh", ridge.
How am I supposed to delight my friends by telling the tale of the Hill Hill Hill Hill if people insist on ruining it by correcting me?
> Oxford Concise Dictionary which describes the word as "Torr pen", top of the hill
Are you and the dictionary authors, respectively, sure? :)
"You see, in Welsh (Romano-British), PEN means hill. In a slightly different version of Gaelic (more common in Ireland and Scotland), ARD means hill. So, Pennard Hill is "Hill Hill Hill". For generation after generation, newcomers to the region have been referred to "that hill over there" - and completely failed to understand. A few more millennia, and the name may be longer than the hill. "
from https://www.strum.co.uk/twilight/pennard.htm
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Brythoni...
The first video hit had someone pronouncing it rhyming with 'home' when it's meant to be "Froom".
Ok, so it got 'Ballachulish' from a video specifically about Scottish Gaelic. (As an aside - how is 'Omagh' difficult?)
Same way as every other English word - the spelling seems unrelated to the pronunciation.
I've never heard this word. Is the 'gh' part pronounced as in though or as in tough?
Oops! Hah. It's a town in Northern Ireland.
Actually it had not occurred to me that the gh is silent. Guess when you know how to say a word it's 'obvious' when of course it's not
It may not be correct by the book (though it usually is), but it is what people use.
The real correct answer to anyone's "what's the right way to say...?" question is a probability distribution.
That's why games like spelling bee make no sense because if you can hear the word, you can write it there is no ambiguity. Some may pronounce words it differently, but they are mostly different dialects. Or in some cases it is accepted as wrong but common pronunciation.
that or the one from the other major city, good ol kuykendahl aka "kir-KEN-doll"
other honorable mentions: puyallup, washington (PYOO-al-ip) koenig ln, austin, tx (KAY-nig) - though admittedly this one is likely originally german König, and what texan is going to pronounce German words like Germans? aqui bleiben wir with Stolz, y'all
Like any tool for language learning its big limitation is the fact that it appears to be writing based.
reminds me of that "what would a 5th grader say" skit where the "which president" answer was something like benjamin franklin...
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.
That's the theory there too, if you wamt to speak like a native, let your brain bathe in native speaking and it will be absorbing all the nuance that won't be in textbooks or classrooms.
Versailles missouri. They pronounce it "ver-sail-ees"
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)
Works great for Chinese and Japanese, too.
Websites like this exist because the eye of Sauron has not yet gazed upon the land.
Though, in the video it is wrongly claimed that "Oachkatzlschwoaf" would mean squirrel, but in fact it means tail of a squirrel (Eichhörnchenschwanz).
Hors d'oeuvres: https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM
Châteauneuf-du-Pape: https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E
Laphroaig: https://youtu.be/UdE20EFNDUs
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
(and that's the real, proper, correct, pronunciation of "pneu" in french)
It would seem they are, yes.
More <https://www.thrillist.com/spirits/scotch/how-to-pronounce-sc...>
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.
I like it in concept, though!
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!
Just looking at it it looks like it should be pronounced "redgEEnuh".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
my German accent only got less notable after speaking a ton of English living in English speaking countries for several years. For some reason losing the accent was way harder than getting rid of an accent in French.
Especially words like 'strength'. If German is your first language there is something about 'r' and 'th' sounds that's so hard to get right.
My experience of working with Germans in tech is that the accent is actually an asset. It's totally playing into a certain stereotype of all Germans being great engineers. "I mean...he is German...he must be smart!"
- If your accent is not noticable, people will assume you have native-like fluency, speak fast and use colloquialisms that you may have trouble understanding. Try to work on comprehension at least as much as accent.
- Everyone in the English-speaking world has an accent anyways. Californians don't speak like Texans, English don't speak like Scottish, there are people throughout the former Commonwealth that speak a version of English that is what "native" means in their country but sounds like acquired language to others.
- When speaking with people who lack fluency in comprehension, better to speak their language if you can, even if you struggle with it. They will have less trouble detecting your incorrect expression. Too often, people who lack fluency in comprehension are afraid to say they don't understand.
You are probably familiar with the generic south west of England accent - "aarr me hearties" and all that fake pirate bollocks. Now listen to the greatest Cockney who ever lived - Dick van Dyke - "Cor blimey Mary Poppins. Very different accents. If you drift up north, why not take a detour via Wales - several accents, quite noticeable when put side by side. The midlands has the Black country "yam yam" and Brummie, go east and there is a whole host of the bloody things. Carry on up and you got "eee bah gum" - Yorkshire and more - bear in mind that Yorkshire alone has a larger population than each of the other nations of the UK and is rather more diverse than even many Yorkies think. Lancs, Mancs and Cheshire, oh and don't forget Liverpudlean (find a recording of the Beatles speaking - they are from Liverpool). Nip on up through Geordie land and Cumbria (Cumbric has only recently died out as another Brythonic language). The Borders, where England and Scotland blur somewhat and the it gets a bit tartan flavoured.
Scotland manages to deploy a lot of accents for roughly 5.5M people. Glasgow and Edinburgh are distinguishable for me and they are only about 50 miles apart. There's Aberdeeeeeen and Perrrrrth and many more!
Over in Ireland (the island) there are several accents. The Dublin "brogue" is considered the easiest accent for a foreigner to understand, which is quite ironic. The Republic of Ireland is home to multiple accents as is Northern Ireland (UK).
The accent that D van D deploys in Mary Poppins is generally known as "Mockney" and that pirate thing is a variety of "Mummerset". Mummer is an old word for actor and Somerset is in the south west of England. This comment is getting lengthy, so I won't delve into Cockney rhyming slang, which is worth looking up if you fancy a right larf, me old septic 8)
Personally when it comes to speaking English I find a false American or English accent quite unnerving.
My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.
>My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.
Nah. People get used to understand certain sequences of sounds and eventually get used to your particular accent, even if initially they had no idea what you were saying. One time I had to work with a Vietnamese woman (let's call her Anna) who said "transaction" like "trunsun" or something; definitely one syllable too few. After several months I was quite able to understand most of what she said, although occasionally I needed her teammate (Barbara) to translate for us. To restate GP's point, both Anna and Barbara spoke grammatically correct English and had definite East Asian accents, but Barbara pronounced things correctly and Anna didn't, so Barbara was easier to speak with, while when speaking with Anna I often had to ask her to repeat herself.
>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.
> "Quid" is longer.
Feel free to post a voice recording, so we can check.
>Feel free to post a voice recording, so we can check.
Nah. I have no interest in convincing you; honestly accepting to be tested at all is probably more than I should have done. I'm merely relaying a personal experience for your edification. If you can't accept it for what it is then continue as you were.
Like I said, I have no interest in convincing you. If you can't accept what I say for what it is, continue as you were.
"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
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.
When learning Japanese I was encouraged to pick a person with a dialect I prefer and listen to them a lot, as I'll likely pick up their accent and mannerisms.
If it was actually perfect grammatical accuracy on their part they’d be saying “Who were you talking to” or “Who were you speaking to”.
Correct is what the people say, not the opinion of literal singular English language teachers.
There is a sizable contingent of English speakers out there that continue to insist that it’s incorrect to end a sentence in a preposition. (I am not part of this group and it is fortunately shrinking over time.)
That is the sort of nonsense up with which one should not put.
What you are probably referring to is the ‘educated European twang’ that often remains when people are targeting the RP accent from 50 years ago.
1. https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/featured