As a non-native English speaker, the "randomness" of English pronunciation has been a source of frustration for me for many years.<p>I realized there are two types of issues:
1. Some sounds in English don't exist in other languages and you have to learn them "from scratch". For example the "flap T" in butter. Or the particular American "r" (constrast it to the Spanish rolled r for instance).
2. Certain sounds I DID know how to make, but didn't know WHEN to make them because spelling is so unreliable. For example, a word like "color" has two "o" letters but neither of them makes an "ou" sound - in fact they make two distinct sounds. For these, I realized you just have to practice it until your mouth "remembers" how to pronounce the word differently (i.e. creates muscle memory).<p>Youglish is great for fine-tuning specific words.<p>I also recommend BoldVoice (disclaimer: I'm a cofounder). We were YC S21 and built the app to help non-native English speakers improve their pronunciation with videos from Hollywood speech coaches and instant feedback via speech recognition ML.
As a <i>native</i> speaker, YouGlish is invaluable if you have to do any audio recording or public speaking and want to make sure you pronounce less common names/places correctly. You can't find those in dictionaries, and Wikipedia is only sometimes helpful.<p>It's also super-useful when you want to use words you've only ever seen in print, without an obvious pronunciation, and the dictionary gives multiple versions without any indication of who uses which ones. YouGlish can reveal whether the difference is regional, or whether one version is more used by academics or by the layperson, etc.
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 <i>actually</i> pronounce it.<p>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. :)<p>For example, there's a street in the city I live in spelled "Guadalupe". Natives pretty much uniformly pronounce it GWAD-uh-LOOP.
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.<p>"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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation</a>
Please dont... "YouTube voice," the narration style(s) that so many creators have picked up, is very annoying. It's worse than "newscaster voice."<p>Edit: This is a cool tool though
Another useful site for hearing pronunciations is Forvo:<p><a href="https://forvo.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://forvo.com/</a><p>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.
Nice that it works in other languages too. It seems useful for finding how words/expressions are used in real conversations. I don't care much about pronunciation, but I want to find context for the (French) words I run into. I am learning French and I use a website with a similar idea: <a href="https://www.linguee.fr" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.linguee.fr</a>. It lets you search for usage of words and shows them in professionally translated context.<p>PS. Just realized the '...' icon on the transcript frame opens another frame with a scrolling transcript. Very neat!
This will be very helpful to me, as someone who is learning several of the supported languages.<p>One piece of feedback: when I choose Cantonese, all I get is Mandarin results. I assume it's because the subtitles of almost all Cantonese videos are actually written in standard Chinese (with traditional characters).<p>It would be pretty hard to distinguish between Mandarin and Cantonese based on subtitles alone, unless you parse the grammar of the sentences or look for Cantonese specific characters.
Mmm... I think there's a danger here. The example "coup de grâce", for example, should be pronounced with the final "s" sound. Otherwise it sounds like "coup de gras", ("strike of fat" instead of "strike of mercy"). But the YouTube videos accidentally leave out the final S. Maybe it's a Britishism? I dunno.<p>Wiktionary calls this a "hyperforeignism", and if you just copy the YouTube videos, you'd never know the difference...<p><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coup_de_gr%C3%A2ce" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coup_de_gr%C3%A2ce</a><p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ngpq7m/psa_youre_probably_pronouncing_the_rune_coup_de/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ngpq7m/psa...</a><p><a href="https://www.dictionary.com/browse/coup%20de%20grace" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.dictionary.com/browse/coup%20de%20grace</a>
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.<p>I like it in concept, though!
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!<p>1. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/featured">https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/featured</a>
Youglish is a great tool and we often hear users reference using it. It's nice to have so many examples available for a given piece of text.<p>What I think makes BoldVoice significantly better is the ability to get feedback on your specific utterances and have the app highlight what elements of a word might make it harder for a native English speaker to understand you. If you go the route of only using youtube/references, you're left in this gradient descent process where you're just guessing mouth movements until you get something that sounds like the reference.
Sometimes grammar can give away a non-native speaker, particularly: “Show me how it looks like.” The use of how here is hard to explain, but it’s wrong. It should be “what it looks like”. This is an instant giveaway usually.<p>But even native English speakers have weird ways of saying things. One grammatical error I hear a lot in people from the Appalachia region is the “needs done” construction. Always sounds bizarre. ie. “This work needs done by tomorrow.” Also the positive “anymore” construction. ie. “You see that a lot anymore” (“these days”).
Just for fun, I looked at how 20 different people pronounced MySQL. The results:<p><pre><code> "My Sequel": 12
"My Ess Kyoo El": 8
"My Squirrel": 0
</code></pre>
I thought "My Sequel" would have something closer to 2/3rds of results rather than 1/2
This is beautiful.<p>Beyond pronunciation, I want to know how to use words in a sentence.<p>(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)
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 :)
Related, but admittedly a bit only indirectly related, I can't recommend the YouTube channel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey">https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey</a> enough.<p>I never thought I could be so engrossed about minute details in the spoken word, yet I don't ever find myself bored watching these videos on the quirks of English pronunciation.<p>Here's a recent video about how to convey differences in the English pronunciations of words such as "fit" and "feet", especially as it relates to native French speakers: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNpbv7hJf6c">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNpbv7hJf6c</a>
The problem is... the English accents are endless!<p>I gave up on improving my understanding of English after watching a video of the Liverpool English accent... at some point the girl uses the R sound instead of the K sound.
<a href="https://youtu.be/R_C4PDSfQJA?t=173" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/R_C4PDSfQJA?t=173</a><p>I finally accepted: There are people who have super clear pronunciation, you know. Some accents are impossible to understand immediately, but with some time you will understand. Some you will never understand!<p>And some media you can understand clearly, but in some cases (Nolan disciples?) the sound is so bad that native speakers don't understand! Captions are your best friends.
But why would I want to sound like a native?<p>- English accent: monocle vibes<p>- Australian accent: Crocodile Dundee (badass but I can’t embody that)<p>- Standard American accent: incredible “twang” (sounds like all wovels are sent through a wah-wah pedal)
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.
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
I actually, without any speck of joke, want to speak english with redneck accent or texan.<p>example of i18n with redneck as target: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120307132029/http://www.ninesys.com/fun/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20120307132029/http://www.ninesy...</a>
Neat. I usually use wordreference.com, but forvo.com has many more accents and some phrases.<p>Just today I noticed how different the US and British pronunciations of Lieutenant are. The British one has an f sound in it, somehow.<p><a href="https://forvo.com/search/lieutenant/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://forvo.com/search/lieutenant/</a>
<a href="https://youglish.com/pronounce/Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch/english" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youglish.com/pronounce/Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychw...</a>?<p>Disappointed on the first result: "I'm not going to try to pronounce". It seems the subs need not match up with what is actually said.<p>The site is really smooth and great to use though.<p>edit: was trying to look up pronunciation of the hill named Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu[0], and very surprisingly got the error "Sorry...your query is too long!".<p>0. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long_place_names" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long_place_names</a>
I'd like to see a collection of pronunciation blind-spots, where people mispronounce words in the same way. E.g., the extra "ar" syllable we put in "narrator", and Ohioans who pronounce Bellefontaine as "bell-fountain", as though it had a "u" in it somewhere.
Problem is, you have to have a native speaker hear <i>you</i> say the words (in a sentence as well as standalone), and give you a feedback. Repeatedly, until you get it "right" (to the extent possible). Otherwise you won't get anywhere - unless you are an 8 year old kid, maybe.
While I strive to hide my German accent, and regularly attempt making my various english accents more specific, I simultaneously hold that there is glory to European English, or, probably more importantly, for example Indian English. The site would feel more progressive if it included those.
Youglish is cool!<p>By the way, I am building “Grammarly for video calls” - you automatically receive feedback on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary after each call.<p><a href="https://getfluently.co" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://getfluently.co</a>
First example I looked up got it wrong.<p>It was "coup de grâce".<p>The video pronounces it "coup de grah", like many other English speaking people, whereas you need to pronounce the final "s" sound: "coup de grass".
Within the UK, you get a whole range of "randomness" (accents). Try listening to this without reading the subtitles for the first time:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQGwe2b18UA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQGwe2b18UA</a><p>It even causes funny problems within the UK. Even in high places like the parliament: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA</a>
One I've noticed growing a gap in recent years is "attribute" which when I used to know as having different pronunciations for the verb and the noun. The links given for different English dialects demonstrate a conflicted range, in line with growth of differing use I've seen generally propagating through, primarily Youtube. Language always changes, so perhaps it doesn't matter, but it seems like things like this might contribute as much as they solve.
Pro tip: Use YouTube to learn the pronunciation of non-English words, too!<p>Hors d'oeuvres: <a href="https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/o1-ndsRPxbM</a><p>Châteauneuf-du-Pape: <a href="https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/3DSgsON3u8E</a><p>Laphroaig: <a href="https://youtu.be/UdE20EFNDUs" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/UdE20EFNDUs</a>
Arnold S .. ch ... war ... err big lad, ran California for a while is being interviewed by Graham Norton on BBC1 now. That's an Irish host on a chat show in the UK with the Governator, a Dame, a comedian and the host of the Repair Shop.<p>Their accents cover quite a lot of ground but I doubt anyone who has a reasonable grasp of English as a foreign language would have any trouble understanding them.
Awesome. My kids will love this one. I signed up but I needed to have a password that is less than 20 characters, no special characters (only alpha numeric characters). I also had to prove that I'm a special robot every time I try to fix their password requirements, which they won't say until you make the mistakes. You should be able to do in about 4 tries at worst.
Examples of why French is hard:<p><a href="https://youglish.com/pronounce/tous/french" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youglish.com/pronounce/tous/french</a>?<p><a href="https://youglish.com/pronounce/dix/french" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youglish.com/pronounce/dix/french</a>?<p>Still very nice tool!
I think this is a brilliant idea and is no doubt useful for discovering variations in pronunciation as well. The first thing I tested it with was "mischievous" which notoriously has a correct - "MIS-chu-vus" - as well as an "incorrect" but very common pronunciation - "mis-CHEE-vee-us" - both of which are represented.
Geez I hope that non-natives don’t use this example for courage.<p><a href="https://youglish.com/pronounce/courage/english" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youglish.com/pronounce/courage/english</a><p>It was the first example I clicked on and it’s clearly someone else speaking that word with her own accent.
What I've found interesting about learning pronunciation is how deliberate you can be about fixing it. A lot of people from Slavic countries tend to pronounce the "th" sound as "d" or "s", including me, but I've stopped doing that mistake literally right after an American pointed out that I do it.
This is a very interesting site.<p>I took the name "Regina" as an example as its pronounced <i>very</i> differently between Canada/UK and US.<p>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)<p>So yeah, its a great start!
I did a test and entered "saute." It worked, except that the first 5 videos were all "Binging with Babish", so it was the same person pronouncing the word. Still pretty cool though, and a lot better than the SEO spammed "how to pronounce" YouTube videos.
I’m not a native English speaker, but I can speak 4 languages. My previous manager always suggested me to take some English class when we had the 1:1. Once a day, I told him: I’m speaking English with you, is because I can speak English, but you can ONLY speak English.
Nice!<p>Finally: <a href="https://youglish.com/pronounce/been/english" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youglish.com/pronounce/been/english</a>?<p>"Been" pronounced "bin" is slowly moving to "ben" (mostly in the US usage).
Previous submissions, the first one 4 years ago with 236 comments<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fyouglish.com%2F" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fyouglish.com%2F</a>
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.
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.
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
I’m guessing this was done by using YouTube’s api to look at transcripts, which are time stamped. This is great. Anyone know if there is a Chinese equivalent video platform that has time stamped characters?
I've been having one on one with my colleagues every week to exercise my pronunciation and the way i form my sentences.<p>Other then that i used to record videos "explaining" the current project I'm working on.<p>It helps a lot.
Does anyone remember the site where you could input a text and it would find movie clips of people saying all the words ? Like a video version of a magazine type ransom note?
small plug for a similar site, <a href="https://filmot.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://filmot.com</a>, which will search for a particular word in subtitles<p><a href="https://filmot.com/search/coup%20de%20gras/1?channelID=&gridView=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://filmot.com/search/coup%20de%20gras/1?channelID=&grid...</a> (hover a thumbnail to play)<p>I've personally found it very useful for japanese learning
This topic can induce Scooten Froody. *<p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo</a>
What I need is an app that would rate my pronunciation against some standard, give me pointers for improvement, and then rate my improvements, and so on.
It's impressive how different it feels to jump right into the middle of videos vs starting from the beginning. Wadsworth's constant in action.
feedback:
- I want to repeat just the word, lots of times, without waiting, so a "rapid repeat" button would be nice.
- Context is good, but the player keeps going, well beyond the initial useful section. My attention span struggles with this.
- I want it for Chinese!!! I would pay for this.<p>Great app, thanks!
This is very useful. My biggest problem, as a non-native English speaker, is figuring out when to use a hard and when a soft "g".<p>Example:<p><a href="https://youglish.com/pronounce/gif/english" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youglish.com/pronounce/gif/english</a>
its cool that it still works across all locales (US, UK) for words spelt differently between countries.<p>E.G. searching “aluminum” still got both US and UK results, even though the later writes it “aluminium”.
Fifty-five year old true story: I was dating a woman in Buffalo; we're both native speakers. She tells me to meet her at a place on "Gothee" Street, over in the Lovejoy district.<p>I bike over to the east side of town, and search all over for Gothee Street. No luck. Ask a few locals - nada. Spend a half hour looking; eventually give up.<p>Next morning, there's hell to pay. She waited an hour for me.<p>What happened? "It's Goethe Street, stupid," she says" "G O E T H E"<p>I had no idea of this super-local pronunciation -- I'd always pronounced the poet's name as "G uh - t uh"<p>(Similar thing happened in a town near Rochester, New York: How do you pronounce Chili, NY ? You'd better say "Chy - Ly" unless you want to sound like a stranger.)
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):<p>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.<p>I am in the latter camp. My Mandarin Chinese accent is really quite good. But I sound like a child.<p>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.
There's English, and a there's bootlegged version thereof, called American. Be mindful which one you learn.<p>Like, you can skejool to buy some aluminum off of the dude inside of the building. Like.<p>/s