Wow, this seemed to work very well for all the words I typed in. I would love to try something like this for German, as it can be hard to pronounce those massive compound words they have.
The one criticism that I have is that many of these videos are from ted talks or speeches by politicians. During speeches people will inflect words differently than in everyday conversation, especially politicians. I got one Theresa May speech and the rest were Americans.
Edit: It's a "pronunciation dictionary". Ppl just record how they say words and indicate their geography. Super useful for languages like English where there are a lot of regional varieties.
And you can contribute too to the dictionary of your language. :)
I'm no affiliated w/ it btw, just really love this website, have been using it for years.
I looked up words that have always tripped me up, including banal, brood, indefatigable, preternatural, conch, niche. Indefatigable, banal, and conch had some conflicting ones but the "correct" one occurred enough times that I got the idea. ("Brood" probably isn't commonly mispronounced, I just got it mixed up early in life and never quite got it sorted it out. :)
The results for "niche" are consistently mixed up though, which means that word will continue to drive me insane. Neesh or nitch!? I mix it up when I use it without any rhyme or reason.
Words which are derived or introduced from foreign languages (common in English) can have varying pronunciations. Some people tend to pronounce it close to how it sounds in the original language, others pronounce it with a more native English (be it American, Australian, British, etc.) accent. 'Croissant' 'Chic' 'Bouquet' 'Renaissance' etc.
Then other words which are more native English words (even if they have Latin, Old French, Greek or proto Germanic roots) will have regional variations.
For example 'Tuna' and 'Tuner' can have their pronunciations switched in some parts of the US.
When you get inconsistent answers, there might be a deeper reason.
Banal was pronounced like anal, but people got embarassed sometime in the 20th century and started starting saying canal. I like anal.
Variations of indefatigable and preternatural are probably from people who have read it but never heard it pronounced (a. The funny/common example is hyperbole/hyperbolic. It's the stress that is most butchered, which cascades into vowels being pronounced differently. Heurstics in this matter can be internalized and improved.
Niche is one possible outcome of anglicization, which is complex and has different results, mostly depending on how common the word ends up. The more foreign-like (French) is neesh. The more anglicized is nich. Neither are worthy of ridicule (which usually comes from the ignorant, and is another topic altogether). Just avoid mixing the two: Never "neech" (like Nietchze) or "nish", which will make me laugh.
The pronunciation of niche has to do with french not pronouncing ch differently from sh. This is somewhat problematic for french people pronouncing Asian words transliterated in Latin alphabets; they will consistently pronounce ch exactly like sh (« konishiwa », …) (Pikachu is mostly pronounced correctly though.)
GIF is another curiously undecided word. I'm also reminded of "gigawatt", which was widely mispronounced following "Back to the Future" in 1985, but is now generally pronounced correctly. I attribute the change to the introduction of gigabyte hard drives.
I only heard the latter pronunciation fairly recently via a YouTuber, who would say "There are riches in nitches" as a mantra. At first, I put it down to a form of colloquialism and it took me a while to figure out, that he meant 'niches'.
The first four pronounce it like I think it is pronounced
then the following five pronounce it as "click"
(ignoring mis-subtitled cases of cliché and claque)
It doesn't seem to be consistent in either British or American pronunciations.
Awesome site! This is infinitely more useful than any other pronunciation site I've seen.
Two questions:
I'm guessing the site uses the YouTube API to build a database from video captions, but which videos does it pull from? All of them or a subset? Querying the word "the" yields about 12 million results which seems low to me.
Also, is there any way to prevent the site from modifying my YouTube watch history? I noticed after clicking around a few times and then going back to YouTube's home page that my recommendations had been updated based on the random videos I'd been fed. Clearly this isn't desirable behavior, but I don't know if there's any way around it. For the time being for other users, I recommend using an incognito or private window.
I'm a native English speaker but this could actually be a very cool discovery tool. I typed in my own (relatively rare) last name and found cool graduations and community organization videos.
This is also an amazing tool for anyone making electronic music that is looking for samples! I've been looking for something like this for quite some time: a tool to find audio clips on YouTube that match a particular phrase. Nothing like "lose your mind, get out of control" [1] to enhance a techno track!
I agree there's an issue; "mispronounced" should be one of the feedback options. The third video for "especially" pronounces the word as "ekspecially".
I would also like to see a feedback option for wrong word (same spelling). For example I searched for "melee" meaning (close to) "chaotic fight", and one of the entries referred to a person called "MeLee". It should be possible to flag this and either automatically or manually review the entry.
Maybe the idea is to be strictly descriptivist? The way people actually pronounce the word _is_ the correct way. That's why you can listen to multiple examples and see what the common pronunciation is.
This is amazing, not only for learning english but also for quickly finding videos of a subject you are interested in (which is quicker than YouTube search as this is almost a "Feeling lucky" search).
Exactly! This is amazing. I can search for esoteric words/ideas like "soulcraft" and instantly find a niche of interesting videos etc. to further my ideas. This is a gamechanger.
Interesting. I found one problem, though. (Or is it a feature?)
All examples I listened to of "coup de grâce" pronounced it /ku də ɡrɑː/, while the "correct" way (if there is such a thing)is /ku də ɡrɑs/.
This kind of thing must come up in more examples. I'm not usually on the prescriptive side of things, but I think it's important to know the "right" way to do things, at least when you're learning a language. On the other hand, hypercorrection will probably never disappear, so why not embrace it?
"Funny" that they have a french word and a french statement as the second and third example. But maybe not and it is intentionally, 'whois' says Registrant Country is FR. In any case, very cool and works impressively AFAICS. Wonder how long it will stay up until our Google overlords sends a cease and desist
“Coup de grace” caught my attention as well. It showed a speaker with a very notable RP pronouncing this phase with a very fake sounding French ‘r’ and no ‘s’ in the end, when the s sound is clearly present in the French and modern English pronunciation. Some might say that he butchered it.
I agree with embracing hypercorrection (or at least, not getting upset about it), but it's also worth accepting that mispronounced loanwords can never really 'win' while the original language still exists, so there will always be a tension. 75m native French speakers will always win any argument about how to pronounce "grâce".
Off-topic, but looking up "/ku də ɡrɑː/" on Google now brings up this thread as one of the top results due to your comment. This comment of mine will only make it worse.
If you want to learn to speak english well, watch those programs that use English properly. Blackadder. Archer. Sherlock. Even some of the marvel movies (GOTG) are very careful in how they pronounce and articulate words. Then watch every Brian Cox and Attenborough documentary. You might come out with a bit of a British accent but that is far far better than any youtube-derived accent. Better you sound like Stirling Archer than [insert random youtube person].
I could never fully appropriate the Australian accent, but something more akin to British becomes non-determinate and easier on the ear (ref: how people prefer speech synthesis in a different English region to their own).
It kind of surprises me that more non-native English speakers don't do the same; I have worked with people who I've really struggled to understand. But I can't really tell them "can you please work on your accent", as much as I wish I could and I knew it would serve them well.
So you would also recommend watching Archer and H. Jon Benjamin animated series? (Bob's Burgers) I'd certainly recommend them though I'm not sure he's a canonical example of the language.
By watching Archer you might also perhaps, better understand when things are phrased inappropriately?
I found out about this tool just 3 days ago and now I see it on the front page of HN.
I was trying to embed an audio version of my name's pronunciation on my blog, since, most people find it hard to pronounce my name. I googled a bit to see if there is any tool that would do it and stumbled upon this lovely app. I was amazed by the idea and accuracy of this app. It works well for the use case it was designed for. Unfortunately, mine was different.
I'm not actually sure how I feel about this. Australian English is distinct, and one of its key features is heavy use of shortened words and dropped letters. For example, the word "going" becomes "goin".
My intuition (and complete guess) is that ML is pretty far away from distinguishing slang words. Maybe it can understand it, at least to some extent, but categorizing it by country (well you really even need region) is harder.
I'm Australian, and I would never recommend that someone learn English by listening to one of my countrymen. We are lazy, nasal, slurred speakers. Standard English or American are much more preferable.
I'm going to rant here... I hate the way some people seem to think that a recording is a good way of explaining the pronunciation of an English word. In my (bigoted) opinion the only good way to explain the pronunciation of an English word is with a phonemic transcription into IPA. This is because even within England there are are lots of different pronunciations of the same sound. What you want (or at least I want) to know is whether the first vowel in "Malcow", say, is the same as the vowel in "hawk" or the vowel in "trap". A recording of a particular person saying just the word "Malcow" doesn't necessarily give you that information, and certainly not in an accessible way.
(Also, a lesser consideration: there are some native speakers of English who can distinguish certain sounds in their pronunciation but cannot, or cannot easily, hear the difference between those sounds. I would guess that either they learnt to speak partly by watching people's lips or their hearing has deteriorated as they got older.)
None of the above is specific to English. If I wanted to know how a French word is pronounced I'd prefer IPA to a recording just the same, if not more so.
Admittedly not everyone loves IPA like I do (perhaps some people think it's a kind of beer). The online Oxford English Dictionary provides IPA transcriptions of both the British and American pronunciations and you can click on them to hear a recording. Perfect.
Several commenters in this thread missed the language drop down.
In addition to being rather small, the drop down has an awful color contrast ratio of 2.75 : 1 between the dark grey text (#7f98ad) and the light grey background (#f5f5f5)[1]. Have you considered making this page more accessible?
Apparently every English student in China learns the following exchange:
How are you doing today? /
I'm fine, thank you, and you?
I've had trouble explaining why this is a weirdly formal response that native speakers would probably never use. So it was somewhat amusing to find zero search results for this! (not counting partial matches). It seems like the first phrases you learn in any foreign language reliably turn out to be phrases nobody actually uses.
I remember many years ago in Spain the most used book to learn English the first sentences were pretty much those and in one of the first lessons there was a sentence that became widely known: "My taylor is rich", it was synonym with studying English.
[+] [-] jalgos_eminator|6 years ago|reply
The one criticism that I have is that many of these videos are from ted talks or speeches by politicians. During speeches people will inflect words differently than in everyday conversation, especially politicians. I got one Theresa May speech and the rest were Americans.
[+] [-] selune|6 years ago|reply
Edit: It's a "pronunciation dictionary". Ppl just record how they say words and indicate their geography. Super useful for languages like English where there are a lot of regional varieties. And you can contribute too to the dictionary of your language. :)
I'm no affiliated w/ it btw, just really love this website, have been using it for years.
[+] [-] overthemoon|6 years ago|reply
I looked up words that have always tripped me up, including banal, brood, indefatigable, preternatural, conch, niche. Indefatigable, banal, and conch had some conflicting ones but the "correct" one occurred enough times that I got the idea. ("Brood" probably isn't commonly mispronounced, I just got it mixed up early in life and never quite got it sorted it out. :)
The results for "niche" are consistently mixed up though, which means that word will continue to drive me insane. Neesh or nitch!? I mix it up when I use it without any rhyme or reason.
[+] [-] mc32|6 years ago|reply
Then other words which are more native English words (even if they have Latin, Old French, Greek or proto Germanic roots) will have regional variations.
For example 'Tuna' and 'Tuner' can have their pronunciations switched in some parts of the US.
[+] [-] RugnirViking|6 years ago|reply
I can't say if that is the case here, but that is what I would suspect. As a british person I have usually heard it and used it as 'neesh'
[+] [-] justnotworthit|6 years ago|reply
Banal was pronounced like anal, but people got embarassed sometime in the 20th century and started starting saying canal. I like anal.
Variations of indefatigable and preternatural are probably from people who have read it but never heard it pronounced (a. The funny/common example is hyperbole/hyperbolic. It's the stress that is most butchered, which cascades into vowels being pronounced differently. Heurstics in this matter can be internalized and improved.
Niche is one possible outcome of anglicization, which is complex and has different results, mostly depending on how common the word ends up. The more foreign-like (French) is neesh. The more anglicized is nich. Neither are worthy of ridicule (which usually comes from the ignorant, and is another topic altogether). Just avoid mixing the two: Never "neech" (like Nietchze) or "nish", which will make me laugh.
[+] [-] jgtrosh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hathawsh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnycab|6 years ago|reply
I only heard the latter pronunciation fairly recently via a YouTuber, who would say "There are riches in nitches" as a mantra. At first, I put it down to a form of colloquialism and it took me a while to figure out, that he meant 'niches'.
[+] [-] learnstats2|6 years ago|reply
The first four pronounce it like I think it is pronounced then the following five pronounce it as "click" (ignoring mis-subtitled cases of cliché and claque)
It doesn't seem to be consistent in either British or American pronunciations.
[+] [-] williamdclt|6 years ago|reply
Pretty sure it comes from French, so "neesh"
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] josteink|6 years ago|reply
I’ve literally only ever heard one person saying nitch. And he was ridiculed for it.
So yeah, for me that pronouncitation seems fairly niche.
[+] [-] theLotusGambit|6 years ago|reply
Two questions:
I'm guessing the site uses the YouTube API to build a database from video captions, but which videos does it pull from? All of them or a subset? Querying the word "the" yields about 12 million results which seems low to me.
Also, is there any way to prevent the site from modifying my YouTube watch history? I noticed after clicking around a few times and then going back to YouTube's home page that my recommendations had been updated based on the random videos I'd been fed. Clearly this isn't desirable behavior, but I don't know if there's any way around it. For the time being for other users, I recommend using an incognito or private window.
[+] [-] smacktoward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fniephaus|6 years ago|reply
Best result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2467&v=4axGm0g-1...
[+] [-] rkuykendall-com|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Za1TlYvBc
I'm a native English speaker but this could actually be a very cool discovery tool. I typed in my own (relatively rare) last name and found cool graduations and community organization videos.
[+] [-] adriand|6 years ago|reply
1. https://youglish.com/search/lose%20your%20mind/all
[+] [-] mjlee|6 years ago|reply
Wrong caption?
Wrong accent?
Poor sound quality.
Poor video quality.
Crude/shocking content.
I don't think any of those fit what I'm hearing for https://youglish.com/getcid/3905773/coxswain
[+] [-] hathawsh|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=478&v=Td2hfdXQ5x...
Love the site, though! Great work.
[+] [-] georgeam|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remedan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XCSme|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] news_hacker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iiv|6 years ago|reply
All examples I listened to of "coup de grâce" pronounced it /ku də ɡrɑː/, while the "correct" way (if there is such a thing)is /ku də ɡrɑs/.
This kind of thing must come up in more examples. I'm not usually on the prescriptive side of things, but I think it's important to know the "right" way to do things, at least when you're learning a language. On the other hand, hypercorrection will probably never disappear, so why not embrace it?
[+] [-] sovande|6 years ago|reply
"Funny" that they have a french word and a french statement as the second and third example. But maybe not and it is intentionally, 'whois' says Registrant Country is FR. In any case, very cool and works impressively AFAICS. Wonder how long it will stay up until our Google overlords sends a cease and desist
[+] [-] jedmeyers|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] playpause|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahuldottech|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kochikame|6 years ago|reply
No variety of any language is superior to another
[+] [-] sundvor|6 years ago|reply
Further to this, I've also worked on my diction using a number of available resources such as https://www.audible.com.au/search?keywords=get+rid+of+your+a... .
I could never fully appropriate the Australian accent, but something more akin to British becomes non-determinate and easier on the ear (ref: how people prefer speech synthesis in a different English region to their own).
It kind of surprises me that more non-native English speakers don't do the same; I have worked with people who I've really struggled to understand. But I can't really tell them "can you please work on your accent", as much as I wish I could and I knew it would serve them well.
[+] [-] groks|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg
[+] [-] sailfast|6 years ago|reply
By watching Archer you might also perhaps, better understand when things are phrased inappropriately?
[+] [-] thallavajhula|6 years ago|reply
I was trying to embed an audio version of my name's pronunciation on my blog, since, most people find it hard to pronounce my name. I googled a bit to see if there is any tool that would do it and stumbled upon this lovely app. I was amazed by the idea and accuracy of this app. It works well for the use case it was designed for. Unfortunately, mine was different.
[+] [-] dave1619|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MRD85|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avinium|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romseb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adpirz|6 years ago|reply
Roughly 60 / 40 short u ('tupple') vs long u ('toople').
[+] [-] godelski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lone_haxx0r|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] personlurking|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloak|6 years ago|reply
(Also, a lesser consideration: there are some native speakers of English who can distinguish certain sounds in their pronunciation but cannot, or cannot easily, hear the difference between those sounds. I would guess that either they learnt to speak partly by watching people's lips or their hearing has deteriorated as they got older.)
None of the above is specific to English. If I wanted to know how a French word is pronounced I'd prefer IPA to a recording just the same, if not more so.
Admittedly not everyone loves IPA like I do (perhaps some people think it's a kind of beer). The online Oxford English Dictionary provides IPA transcriptions of both the British and American pronunciations and you can click on them to hear a recording. Perfect.
[+] [-] bhelkey|6 years ago|reply
In addition to being rather small, the drop down has an awful color contrast ratio of 2.75 : 1 between the dark grey text (#7f98ad) and the light grey background (#f5f5f5)[1]. Have you considered making this page more accessible?
[1] https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.5/color-contrast
[+] [-] wonnage|6 years ago|reply
I've had trouble explaining why this is a weirdly formal response that native speakers would probably never use. So it was somewhat amusing to find zero search results for this! (not counting partial matches). It seems like the first phrases you learn in any foreign language reliably turn out to be phrases nobody actually uses.
[+] [-] weinzierl|6 years ago|reply
This seems to be so common that there are even a bunch of Youtube videos out there about this topic, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_53mo10_Mbk
[+] [-] ghostDancer|6 years ago|reply