At the moment I see a few comments criticizing the mixed results in accents and pronunciations. I am a Brazilian who speaks English at work, so I just wanted to share my use case for Youglish.<p>I go to Youglish whenever I have <i>no idea</i> on how to pronounce a word. I read English much more than I listen to English (HN contributes to that), so it is not uncommon to find such words. I don’t need (nor want) to find the right accent to emulate or reach the perfect pronunciation to pass for a native speaker. I just want to be able to pronounce in a way that my coworkers will understand which word I am using.<p>My coworkers are kind and reasonable, so they don’t expect perfect pronunciation from me either, they just want to understand the words that are coming out of my mouth.<p>So, for me, it is not relevant at all that the accents might be mixed. As long as I learn <i>a</i> way to pronounce it, no matter <i>which</i> way. Youglish is a great resource for me.<p>(another is Grammarly, I stil don’t know why they don’t direct they marketing to non-native English speakers more, as it is perfect for us)
The categorization of dialects is a bit disappointing.<p>What the hell is an "Uk" accent? So a posh southern English accent would be the same category as a northern one? I get that considering nearly every city has its own dialect of English it would hard to offer some sensible mapping but it still feels kind of wrong.<p>If I search for the word "climate" in "Uk", "Irish" or "New Zealand" I get the same British English video, otherwise a Scottish English video for US. Don't offer me that many choices if you are going to lump them all together anyway.<p>Honestly they should have just offered a switch between American English and "British English" (the Received Pronunciation that many learn at school).<p>Other than that, seems like a great idea and already working reasonably well.
Lol fuck English pronunciation. We don't have to sound like Californian Valley douchebags anymore.<p>English is an international language. It no longer belongs to the oppressor. Don't sell out your culture. German accented English=sex.
One past thread:<p><i>Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20225093" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20225093</a> - June 2019 (236 comments)
I love that "coup de grace" is listed in the examples, as it's actually... French!<p>Reminds me of the famous (fictional?) quote of Bush president saying "There is no french word for entrepreneur !" :-)
I like this site, it helps me a lot with pronunciation especially someone like me that doesn't go on the TV or watch many videos.<p>Since the day knowing this site, I found out that I had pronounced many words incorrectly in the past.<p>A few things people have pointed out, we have to go through sorting out the accents, multiple pronunciations for the same word, etc... But this is very good for the basic pronunciation search.
> Your daily search quota has exceeded.<p>> Please come back tomorrow or upgrade to one of YouGlish's Premium account plans.<p>Well, that was a fun 10 minutes while it lasted... One can definitely have endless fun with this. It's almost like clicking "Random" on Wikipedia except you have to think of a word/phrase first. Or use Wikipedia's "Random" and input that word into YouGlish :D
This is a better idea than searching for word+" pronunciation" , because of videos like this: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hx052Tiz9E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hx052Tiz9E</a>
I feel like this would be even more helpful to me if it would only show me videos of people's faces while they are pronouncing the word, so I can see their mouth positions.
We use it to settle pronunciation arguments.<p>Sometimes we find that we're both right when the word has multiple pronunciations. Those are the best.
The pronunciation of "pronunciation" is with "nun" not "noun", unlike "pronounce".<p>But "correct" pronunciation is community-based: that's where language came from and that's where it remains. The only way for there to be a correct pronunciation is if people <i>name</i> it "Correct Pronunciation".
I came across YouGlish a while ago and found it really useful for finding interesting content in different languages.<p>Shameless plug: I wrote an add-on to use YouGlish with Anki.
<a href="https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/38866997" rel="nofollow">https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/38866997</a>
This is really cool. As a native speaker it's not really relevant for me but impressed nonetheless. Excellent site, I wish there was something equivalent for Mandarin or German.<p>Tried this one off the bat - <a href="https://youglish.com/pronounce/elucidation/english" rel="nofollow">https://youglish.com/pronounce/elucidation/english</a>?
I just found out that you can search "covfefe" on this. It's not even on most dictionaries!<p>I was about to write that "one downside of this is that you can only search a word that can be speech recognized"... then I've seen this which kinda blew my mind.
It's missing Yorkshire! I live in a farming village, you do occasionally hear voices like this one - <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ScELaXMCVis" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ScELaXMCVis</a>
I feel bad for anyone who tries to get English pronunciation "correct".<p>I'm Canadian. My family is of Scottish, Irish, and English descent. I am painfully aware of how many dialects, exceptions to words, weird pronunciations, and accents affect what should be the same word.<p>My wife is Russian and is fluent in English from having lived here in Canada since she was a child.<p>We regularly get into arguments about how something is pronounced. Most of the time, we find that it's commonly said one way here in this part of Canada, but has 1 different pronunciation in a different part of Canada and 3 more pronunciations back in the UK or Australia.<p>Since Canada is very multi-cultural and there are real Scottish, Irish, Indian, Australian, etc speakers everywhere here, who can say what is the right way to say a word in English?<p>Can we really say that the word is supposed to be X when I have 5 people in the room, all with legitimate other ways to say it that are true for their version of English? Who is right? Does it matter who is right? How much should we care about correct pronunciation at all? It's not even a pedantic discussion anymore for me, it's a legitimate and real confusion day-to-day.<p>As an example, I went to the above linked "youglish" site and it gave a suggestion for "courage". Some semi-British, possibly Eastern US sounding person said "coo-rah-dg" but here in my part of Canada, I would say it as "cur-ah-dg". They sound rather different and in passing, you might even think I'm saying a different word than "courage". Both are right, but here is a website that will cause someone to tell me my pronunciation is wrong.<p>I feel like English is too broken and disparate in its many acceptable spoken variations to have a site like this ever work without stoking further arguments.
I love it! Though the results for "buoy" were mixed! (British guy catering presumably to intl/US audience pronouncing it incorrectly :D)
I looked up "synecdoche" (to see if it would give me this video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-n1vGeVIXo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-n1vGeVIXo</a>), and a few of the examples are of people saying "Schenectady" but mis-transcribed. I guess you can just use your judgment to filter out a few mistakes, so no big deal.