I realized there are two types of issues: 1. Some sounds in English don't exist in other languages and you have to learn them "from scratch". For example the "flap T" in butter. Or the particular American "r" (constrast it to the Spanish rolled r for instance). 2. Certain sounds I DID know how to make, but didn't know WHEN to make them because spelling is so unreliable. For example, a word like "color" has two "o" letters but neither of them makes an "ou" sound - in fact they make two distinct sounds. For these, I realized you just have to practice it until your mouth "remembers" how to pronounce the word differently (i.e. creates muscle memory).

Youglish is great for fine-tuning specific words.

I also recommend BoldVoice (disclaimer: I'm a cofounder). We were YC S21 and built the app to help non-native English speakers improve their pronunciation with videos from Hollywood speech coaches and instant feedback via speech recognition ML.

There are many English dialects, and sounds (and meanings) vary, A LOT. It's up to you whether you want to try and assimilate the local dialect of where you live right now, or you want to simply understand and be understood.

There are many non-native speakers who are extremely easy to understand, even though it is clear that English is their second (or third) language. I believe the hardest part is to learn how to make sounds that do not exist in your native language (both consonants and vowels). But the good news is that there are ways to learn that. The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.

The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound. So trying to make the sounds out of the letters will always be a frustrating endeavor, as there will never be a single rule you can follow.

Spanish does have a regulatory agency (RAE) that we choose to follow, but AFAIK, they don't say anything about pronunciation. Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Colombia all have different pronunciations and not one is more official than the other. There's a certain sense of what's "normal" or nearer the center of gravity for most speakers, but I think that's true for English too (new zealand or south african English is less "standard" than a Midwestern accent or BBC English)

As a native Italian, I'm convinced that using the Latin alphabet without embracing phonetic spelling can only be driven by idiocy ;-)

Still, Italian is still perfectly phonetic in writing: can you imagine never having to ask how to spell a town name, or a family name? Can you imagine a word where spelling bees do not exist because they could make no sense? If you hear it, you can spell it.

By the way, your example of "tʃ, dʒ" is spot on, as in you cannot guess how a Z character is to be read, but in practice very few people ever notice. Concerning "ŋ", I think only Italian linguists know about it as a separate phoneme.

You are wrong, instead, about "ɲ": "gn" is always pronounced as in "gnocchi".

I'm no linguist, but English has also drawn a lot from other neighboring languages. Understanding a bit of French, Dutch or German helps a lot with understanding which English words are pronounced in which way. It's not random is what I mean.

I once knew a EU parlament translator and linguist with 6+ languages under his belt. When he visited us in Poland he would not shut up - he tried reading every sign, every word, kept asking how it's pronounced. Just continuously played with language, like a software developer does with code. When he was leaving after a two day stay he had a lot of Polish quite well figured out, it was really impressive. But he was just really willing to fail over and over and over in all social interactions.

Oh come on. The fact that there is no regulatory body doesn't mean we can't meaningfully talk about "English pronunciation" in a general way. And Spanish and German have different dialects , accents and pronunciations too.

> The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound

How is the spelling guided by meaning?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_th...

I had no idea this would exist. I guess it makes sense that people would try to do something like this, but also, to my English addled brain, not much sense to expend the effort.

It gives the language a good balance between spelling and pronouncing - that's why you can pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written (I think there are very very few exceptions, if at all). But this comes at a price of losing ability to track meaning some times.

Sometimes it is not going so well, for example, look at the tumultuous German reform of 1996.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1...

Afaik there is no such regulatory body for Russian language, and yet as long as you know the alphabet, you should be able to pronounce almost every single word correctly (even if you have never seen or heard it before).

There are a few exceptions, but I cannot even recall them right now, aside from super common ones that make natural sense. Example: “что” aka “chto”, with “ch” being pronounced more like “sh” (which would naturally end up happening if you try pronouncing it as written aka “chto” a few times).

In particular for French, l'Académie Française is pretty much a joke, with mostly ecclesiastics above 80 years old, no linguists involved, and nothing produced in the last 50 years.

This is only partially true: the language a person speaks affects the development of facial muscles used to make those sounds. So trying to speak a different language that uses different muscles can be very difficult. Of course, as you said, it's a matter of practice: with enough practice, you can develop those muscles, just like pumping weights in a gym.

(English "o" is tons of fun-- of the 22 vowel sounds listed on the English orthography page on Wikipedia, only two can't generally have the letter "o" involved.)

More than half of my life lived in English-speaking countries does not help quite enough to avoid a migraine with this one.

Doesn't it though?

Neat example. What's also interesting is that it's hard to parse visually too, so it slows down reading.

That it why we spell it as "colour" in English. Americans removed the "u" from their dialect which makes a needlessly complicated language even more so.

Learning Dutch really opened my eyes as to how terrible English is as a written language. The funny thing is that it's mirrored in our law - English law is all about case law and president. We don't even have a formal written constitution.

No. That was due to french influence. Not to be more phonetic.

> Americans removed the "u" from their dialect which makes a needlessly complicated language even more so.

Webster removed it to make it more phonetic. Do you pronounce color the same way as flour? Of course not. Color, harbor, favor, etc is more phonetically accurate than colour, harbour, favour, etc.

> The funny thing is that it's mirrored in our law - English law is all about case law and president.

Precedent.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Essay_on_Waters/UWtb...

You can find many other things of interest in here, like the use of the medial s, which only died out in the mid 1800s and makes reading old texts very annoying.

It's important to remember that for centuries in English, there was no such thing as standardized spelling. You spelled it how you felt it should be spelled. This extended even to people's own names. This didn't really change until the late 1700s-1800s.

Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin "color" via the Old French "color."

My all time favorites are the words that are literally spelled the the same but pronounced differently, for no reason - like "wind".

Or, similar but again pronounced differently - thought, through, though, tough - why are these like that? No (good) reason.

And names, too. Worcester, guess how that's pronounced? :)

Maybe this is my own idiosyncrasy though and not what others would do. I’ve never even thought about it until just now.

Based on context, I assume you mean a native "American English" speaker, rather than a "Native American" English speaker :)

The Americans and the British, one people separated by a common language.

:thumbs_up:

I'm a native English speaker and I also have trouble with the American ah.

I grew up near Boston.

- bouny hunner

- innerview

- alannic ciddy

- Rocky Mounins

- haunid house

- udderly

- budder (the bagel topping)

- winner (the season)

- bidder (the taste)

- invennive

- annie-American

- bedder

- odder (the cute wadder mammal)

The inventive ways that Ts are dropped in favor of:

- Ns

- Ds

- glottal stops

- nothing at all

are legion.

I've mused about publishing a compilation of these words with dropped Ts, but it's hit-or-miss whether the other person in America who cares would buy the book.

Oh and eeeand. The word and used to be monosyllabic.

I bet there are a list of words where the loss of each of the 26 letters can be lamented. For example (off the top of my head), the a in head, the b in dumb, the first c in necklace, the d in handsaw ...

There are probably more people than that that care, but most of them would probably prefer something more like the broad description of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Engl... rather than a catalog of words exhibiting one (or, rather, parts of a couple, related vy the starting sound) of the listed consonant shifts.

It's an amusing work of high-vocabulary words with an excerpt from actual usage with the definition and etymology. Catamite, for example, is memorably demonstrated with, I believe, the opening sentence of Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers":

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

Yesterday, I saw an automatic caption of a Youtube video that said "admission" instead of "emission" (which is what I heard the speaker say, and certainly was the intention). The line is very thin indeed.

On the other hand, my (very Punjabi) family members who actually live there pronounce it "Turronto", with hard T's, rolling R's, and a heavy emphasis on the final T. If you've heard the most common form of the Indian English accent, you know what I mean.

So now I just call it "that city in Canada". I just know I'll mangle it if I say it out loud.

ETA: Also I just clicked on the site logo on /frequently-asked-questions and got pointed to /old-home-2, which is a 404. I swear I don’t seek out bugs, they come to me all by themselves :)

[1] https://projectfluent.org/

And we have a placement test -- it's in the Resources tab, under "Assessment". Lmk how it works for you!

Re: 404... don't know what you're talking about ;)

[1] https://www.boldvoice.com/frequently-asked-questions

What a clusterfuck. This may be a better option now: https://www.iq.com/

Nothing in language can actually be hard. It just takes enough practice to start thinking like a native.

But note I said practice, not repetition. You have to want to do it correctly. If you have an ear for correctness you will get there.

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.

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.

> 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.

"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

> Oxford Concise Dictionary which describes the word as "Torr pen", top of the hill

Are you and the dictionary authors, respectively, sure? :)

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?

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Brythoni...

- 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)

It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP" but I guess its not even that bad compared to many mispronunciations

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)

What's the better/closer-to-original pronunciation?

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

Not saying it's right or wrong, but the two are different.

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

Like any tool for language learning its big limitation is the fact that it appears to be writing based.

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"

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.

It may not be correct by the book (though it usually is), but it is what people use.

reminds me of that "what would a 5th grader say" skit where the "which president" answer was something like benjamin franklin...

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"

"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

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.)

  Texan: Where are you from?
  
  Harvard Student: I'm from a place where we don't end sentences with prepositions.
  
  Texan: OK. Where are you from, jackass?

That is the sort of nonsense up with which one should not put.

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.

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.

PS. Just realized the '...' icon on the transcript frame opens another frame with a scrolling transcript. Very neat!

Edit: This is a cool tool though

I can't say I've ever noticed that -- do you have particular creators/videos in mind?

I first assumed they were referring to the "I have just figured out a secret, little child, and I'm deigning to share it with you" type voice that Johnny Harris and people making videos of that ilk put on.

Then I thought maybe they were talking about the YouTube voice people like Connor (CDawgVA) and Ludwig put on, which is a mix of the "hype" voice you mention and a sort of 80s radio presenter voice.

The conclusion is that there's no such thing as a "YouTube voice" that the GP comment mentions, it all depends on which bubble of YouTube you're familiar with and extrapolate to the whole of it.

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.

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).

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.

Wiktionary calls this a "hyperforeignism", and if you just copy the YouTube videos, you'd never know the difference...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coup_de_gr%C3%A2ce

https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ngpq7m/psa...

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/coup%20de%20grace

"Coo du grar"

Edit : Just remembered this scene from Kill Bill where Michael Madsen says it : https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/50fcbf85-e7ca-4d07-8242-adb15db...

I think I just happened to learn that phrase in grade school, from a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook lol[1], while I was learning French and witnessing the horror that was "foie gras". So the "de gras" part just never made sense to me, coincidentally.

[1] It's an automatic crit against a helpless opponent (https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/3e_SRD:Helpless_Defenders). Was really useful in Neverwinter Nights when you could paralyze or sleep an enemy then have the melee guy finish 'em off :) Who said games weren't educational?!

Edit: looking at Google Maps in English, maybe I hope this will be reversed. This seems to be UN sanctioned bullying by a dictator. Türkiye looks weird in English a way I wouldn't be proud of. There are plenty of other countries where english speakers don't call them the same thing they call themselves. I wasn't aware until your comment that the bird was named after the country, that changes it for me, along with Google Maps putting the dots on the ü on it when it doesn't do that for other countries.

I don't get this reference :(

> Cocoa

Co-co? Co-co-ah? What's right?

Cacao.

Edit: it appears I was mistaken about Pavo, it was articles in Spanish about the official change in English name from Turkey to Turkiyé. On maps in Spanish I see a lot of other countries with spanish names that are quite different like Costa de Marfil instead of Ivory Coast and Países Bajos instead of Netherlands.

Egypt is too, as well as the US I suppose (to mention only countries more populated than Turkey). Their population distribution is more unbalanced than Turkey or Russia though.

I like it in concept, though!

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.

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNpbv7hJf6c

1. https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/featured

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. https://youtu.be/R_C4PDSfQJA?t=173

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!

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.

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.

  "My Sequel": 12
  "My Ess Kyoo El": 8
  "My Squirrel": 0

- Early versions of SQL were actually called SEQUEL (Structured English QUEry Language). - Sequel is just much easier to say than SQL, especially within a sentence.

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.

Though, in the video it is wrongly claimed that "Oachkatzlschwoaf" would mean squirrel, but in fact it means tail of a squirrel (Eichhörnchenschwanz).

example of i18n with redneck as target: https://web.archive.org/web/20120307132029/http://www.ninesy...

https://youglish.com/pronounce/tous/french?

https://youglish.com/pronounce/dix/french?

Still very nice tool!

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”).

- English accent: monocle vibes

- Australian accent: Crocodile Dundee (badass but I can’t embody that)

- Standard American accent: incredible “twang” (sounds like all wovels are sent through a wah-wah pedal)

On rare occasions that it matters, for instance for a play or for a song where people would notice a wrong accent, I can work to get it right on those particular words. It's a lot of work, but it's still easy compared to getting to the point where you do everything without thinking.

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.

https://youglish.com/pronounce/courage/english

It was the first example I clicked on and it’s clearly someone else speaking that word with her own accent.

It even causes funny problems within the UK. Even in high places like the parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA

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.

The site is really smooth and great to use though.

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!".

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long_place_names

By the way, I am building “Grammarly for video calls” - you automatically receive feedback on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary after each call.

https://getfluently.co

Just today I noticed how different the US and British pronunciations of Lieutenant are. The British one has an f sound in it, somehow.

https://forvo.com/search/lieutenant/

My Polish colleagues do seem to find Indian English accents easier to understand than Irish ones.

Great app, thanks!

Finally: https://youglish.com/pronounce/been/english?

"Been" pronounced "bin" is slowly moving to "ben" (mostly in the US usage).

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fyouglish.com%2F

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.

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)

More https://www.thrillist.com/spirits/scotch/how-to-pronounce-sc...>

It would seem they are, yes.