
Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation - interweb
https://youglish.com/
======
jalgos_eminator
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.

~~~
SilasX
Seconded. I still can't tell apart the first a's in Ratte vs Rathaus, and
Germans assure me they're different and the difference breaks any attempts to
make puns based on the two (Rathaus=city hall, but to my ear feels like Ratte-
house/haus).

~~~
andrevoget
As a German I can assure you that both "a" in Ratte and Rathaus sound the
same. The "a" in Rathaus is just spoken a bit longer and the following "t" is
hardly pronounced, whereas the "a" in Ratte is spoken very short and the "t"
is pronounced strongly. I hope that helps.

~~~
taejo
I.e., they have the same _quality_ but different _quantity_ , and German does
distinguish vowels by length, so they are different sounds in the sense that
two words that otherwise sound the same can be distinguished by vowel length.
"Ratten" and "raten", for a relavent example, are not homophones and nor are
"Massen" and "Maßen" (German learners might be frustrated to learn that in
fact these two are opposites in some contexts).

~~~
GorgeRonde
A few remarks on methodology in linguistics (the science).

A _phone_ is a class of sounds (as opposed to their instances which are all
unique) that can be reliably described by articulatory or acoustic features
(phonetics) or by patterns found in EEG (I'm thinking of MIT's voiceless mic).

A _phoneme_ is another type of "sound" class used in linguistics and it is
arguably the more important: phonemes, as studied in the context of a
particular language, is the finite set of sounds (a few dozens at most) from
which you build different words in that language. Phonemes always come in
pairs, since they are defined as the minimal distinctive linguistic unit that
can yield a difference in meaning.

Substitute /p/ with /f/ in/fear/ and you get /pear/, i.e. another word, a
difference in meaning --> thus /p/ and /f/ are phonemes.

But substitute /r/ with /rrrrr/ in /Braveheart/ and you get the same word but
with a scottish accent. These do not form a phonemic pair but allophonic
variations of the same phoneme (here according to different geographic areas
but they can also vary according to age, social status, gender, etc ...)

------
selune
I always used forvo.com for this kind of thing.

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.

~~~
noja
Is the American pronunciation of "communal" correct there?
[https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_usa/](https://forvo.com/search/communal/en_usa/)

~~~
wyclif
No, this is wrong. It sounds like it's being mispronounced by a native German
speaker. There is no hard initial vowel sound; the first syllable is not
emphasized like that. There are three syllables in the word: com-mun-al and
it's pronounced "kəˈmyo͞on(ə)l,ˈkämyənəl/" so the stress is on the second, not
the first syllable.

~~~
jakubp
She does put the stress on the second syllable.

------
overthemoon
This is very cool.

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
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.

~~~
jjeaff
I find it interesting that British English speakers are much more likely to
pronounce the english sounding version rather than close to how it sounds in
the original language.

For example, pretty much across the board I hear "filet" pronounced with the
't' in British English. But Americans almost always a silent 't' like the
French.

~~~
Vinnl
Your comment led me to check: although there's just a few British persons
saying filet, they all pronounce it the "English way", except when it precedes
"mignon". Which makes sense, I guess.

~~~
buckminster
The only place I've ever seen filet separated from mignon is McDonald's.
Everything else is fillet.

------
theLotusGambit
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.

~~~
sundarurfriend
> my recommendations had been updated based on the random videos I'd been fed.
> Clearly this isn't desirable behavior

Oh, it very much is desirable behaviour for me, I see it as an opportunity to
get out of my filter bubble and remember YouTube's content variety. Especially
given that the videos here are constrained to be from the UK, having captions
and hence likely not "funny viral clips" or random vlogs.

------
smacktoward
Finally, a way to learn how to pronounce such important conversational phrases
as "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" and "Google flat Earth."

------
fniephaus
8 pronunciations of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in English:
[https://youglish.com/search/supercalifragilisticexpialidocio...](https://youglish.com/search/supercalifragilisticexpialidocious/all)

Best result:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2467&v=4axGm0g-1...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2467&v=4axGm0g-1-o)

~~~
rkuykendall-com
One clip was so intriguing, I had to go back and watch the whole thing, and it
was really good:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Za1TlYvBc](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.

~~~
mlrtime
That led me on a 30 minute divergence, thanks :)

------
adriand
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!

1\.
[https://youglish.com/search/lose%20your%20mind/all](https://youglish.com/search/lose%20your%20mind/all)

~~~
zubspace
Don't want to rain on your parade, but the next passage comes straight out of
their TOS:

User acknowledges sole responsibility for obtaining required licenses.
YOUGLISH.COM grants you permission to display, copy, distribute and download
the Materials on this Site provided that: (1) both the copyright notice
identified below and this permission notice appear in the Materials; (2) the
use of such Materials is solely for personal, non-commercial use; and (3) the
Materials are not modified in any way.

~~~
adriand
These are YouTube videos. I don't think the Youglish TOS has any sway over
them. Besides, I'd rely on the fair use doctrine, which I think applies in
this case.

------
mjlee
How do you leave feedback for what is just a bad pronunciation? The options I
can see are: This is not english!

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](https://youglish.com/getcid/3905773/coxswain)

~~~
hathawsh
I agree there's an issue; "mispronounced" should be one of the feedback
options. The third video for "especially" pronounces the word as
"ekspecially".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=478&v=Td2hfdXQ5x...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=478&v=Td2hfdXQ5x8)

Love the site, though! Great work.

------
XCSme
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).

~~~
news_hacker
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.

------
iiv
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?

~~~
sovande
> coup de grâce

"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

------
sandworm101
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].

~~~
kochikame
So you're equating using English "properly" with British (specifically,
English) English? From a linguistic point of view, you couldn't be more wrong.

No variety of any language is superior to another

~~~
smcl
For starters one of them - Archer - is American, not British. And nobody is
saying one language is better than the other, but certainly with these
programs you won't pick up bad habits like using "hence why" or confusing
"than" and "then" (which I see ALL the time here on HN).

It's not even a UK vs USA thing - for me (a Scot) I notice that large parts of
southern England have _appalling_ pronunciation ("fing" vs "thing", "bovver"
instead of "bother", pronouncing "r" like "w" \- see how the guy on the right
pronounces "presentation" as "pwesentation", and "Ryzen" like "Wyzen" here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP2QkBnRqko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP2QkBnRqko)),
and that's the most populous region so much of our TV would also be no-go for
English learners.

~~~
JetSetWilly
You are just attaching prestige to some variants of the language over others.
It just so happens that variants of English spoken by professional classes in
the SE of England or NE USA are more prestigious (at least for some) than
variants of English in a pub in Liverpool or Glasgow, but those other variants
are not "wrong" and don't have "appalling pronunciation", they just have
different pronunciation.

If there was a revolution and the residents of liverpool became the new ruling
classes then pretty quickly that would be the "correct" variant and the
queen's English would be the "appalling pronunciation".

~~~
smcl
I'm not sure if you read my comment right, it seems you have understood it
_exactly_ the wrong way round. I'm Scottish, saying that contrary to popular
belief it is actually the south of England who make the most bizarre
pronunciation choices in the UK

The guy in the video I linked is actually an _excellent_ example of the
"professional class", and should by conventional wisdom be the kind of
pronunciation you should aim for ... but you'd be entirely wrong to do so.

~~~
JetSetWilly
Every word in the English language is a poorly pronounced version of some
older word that preceded it. What makes some words as pronounced in the south
of England bizarre or wrong?

~~~
smcl
Well the whole point of this is that someone was suggesting examples of good
English, someone balked at the idea that British English should be considered
"proper" and I suggested that this wasn't the intended point point and added
that even supposedly highly regarded accents of British English might not be
considered proper by someone from that same country. I don't think it's
helpful in this context to shrug your shoulders and say that English is
evolving so there's no good or bad examples of pronunciation.

As to why these sound wrong to me, I'm from an area that is looked down on
accent-wise and is sort of the subject of ridicule (usually just for fun).
Since I moved abroad and mix in pretty multi-cultural circles I've seen first-
hand what non-native-English speakers have trouble understanding when they
talk to an English-native speaker, and I've often reflected on what caused
this. One thing that surprised me was how easily my fellow Scots have been
understood and how much difficulty people had understanding the English, since
I was always led to believe that we are the ones who talk incorrectly. And it
was this that made me realise how their pronunciation can stray far from the
supposedly correct one - I gave a couple of examples to demonstrate this.
There are plenty more if you listen carefully. The "how do you pronounce..."
part of the NY Times British & Irish accent quiz was really quite good at
illustrating this:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/britis...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/british-
irish-dialect-quiz.html) (door/poor, farm/palm, horse/hoarse from there are
nice examples).

So yeh sure, nothing is "wrong" in English and all that - there's no central
authority that should dictate this. But when it comes to accents and clarity
not all is as it might seem at first blush.

------
thallavajhula
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.

------
dave1619
Does this site violate YouTube's terms of service for putting banner
ads/advertising on the same pages as the YT embedded videos?

------
MRD85
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".

~~~
hombre_fatal
You chose an example that is ubiquitous in USA, like "gonna".

~~~
MRD85
It's not just going. It's nearly any word ending in a g.

Ending = endin Surfing = surfin

In Australia "Gonna" = "Going to"

~~~
jumelles
USA too.

------
adpirz
[https://youglish.com/search/tuple/all](https://youglish.com/search/tuple/all)?

Roughly 60 / 40 short u ('tupple') vs long u ('toople').

~~~
autoexec
Is the short u 'tupple' wrong despite it's popularity because if so I've been
lying to people...

~~~
Retra
You should use 'tupple' when referring to odd-length tuples, and 'toople' when
referring to even-length tuples. That is obviously the only sane compromise.

~~~
kurtisc
Any ideas for 'trie'?

~~~
pvg
Yes. Correctly pronounced with a Khoisan click.

------
godelski
All right everyone! We're ALL wrong! GIF is pronounced:
[https://youglish.com/search/gif/all](https://youglish.com/search/gif/all)

~~~
cardingggg
I don't know if different people see different video queues, but I had 2
subsequent videos of the same person pronouncing GIF as `GIFF` and `JYFE` :-/

~~~
godelski
Weird, the one I've see spells it out. But they aren't intending to say the
image format.

------
lone_haxx0r
Am I the only one that uses Google Translate "listen" option for learning
pronunciation of weird words?

~~~
personlurking
I recommend forvo.com (like another commenter mentioned), as GT doesn't work
that great for certain languages (ex. Catalan is just a robotic voice).

------
bloak
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.

~~~
azangru
As Daniel Jones wrote in his The Pronunciation of English (I am paraphrasing
from the 1962 edition, because I do not have it at hand), it is impossible to
learn the sounds of English from phonemic transcriptions alone; you need a
living teacher, or, in absense of them, good recordings of representative
sounds (he went on to reference certain good-quality authoritative recordings
of the time). Youtube can be regarded as one source of such recordings.

~~~
bloak
Yes. There are two different things here:

* Learning how to pronounce the sounds of English: for example, how to pronounce (standard) English /a/, which is, of course, different from (standard) German /a/.

* Learning which sounds to use in a particular word: for example, is "swap" pronounced /swap/? (It isn't, of course. In practice most of the difficulties are caused by names of people and places.)

------
bhelkey
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?

[1] [https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.5/color-
contrast](https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/2.5/color-contrast)

------
wonnage
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.

~~~
trosi
Can you elaborate a bit on why it's a weird response? What would be more
appropriate? Non-native speaker here

~~~
barry-cotter
It’s quite formal and ritualised in a language whose premier cultural exporter
has been quite outwardly egalitarian since at least WWII.

It’s just old fashioned. If you’re on this forum you’ve read enough English
you’re unlikely to mess up but

How are you?

Great thanks. You?

Fine, fine.

It’s scripted insofar as no one cares how the other person actually is and
answering I anything other than a positive fashion would be a faux pas but
everything after “How are you?” is fluid. You can also go even less formal,
e.g. “How’s it going?”

------
sys13
Got a message, 'you have been banned from this site'

~~~
autoexec
What words were you looking for?

------
philliphaydon
I searched for "Swap" because my co-worker used to say "swa app".

[https://youglish.com/search/swap/all](https://youglish.com/search/swap/all)

[https://youtu.be/vJSk4RR2QO4?t=313](https://youtu.be/vJSk4RR2QO4?t=313)

This video comes back, and he actually says 'swat'...

------
pacomerh
hehe, I had to try the words I know are pronounced wrong. "Paella" it's
pronounced paeya, not payeya. Also half the population says ecsetera instead
of etcetera

~~~
dennisgorelik
Only about 1 in 8 speakers uses incorrect "excetera" pronunciation:

[https://youglish.com/search/%22et%20cetera%22/all](https://youglish.com/search/%22et%20cetera%22/all)?

Even 12% -- is far too many for my taste. But at least I can use "et cetera"
pronunciation as a quick "literacy level" test.

~~~
simias
It's an extremely common deformation I think, "excetera" is also a very common
pronunciation in French. I really doubt it's heavily tied to literacy level at
any level, it's probably more comfortable to pronounce.

Remember that basically every word of your language (regardless of the
language) was probably at some point considered some low-class corruption of
the "proper" language.

When it comes to English in particular look at the mess that's English
spelling and the massive phonetic shifts it underwent during the past
centuries, it seems a bit silly to single out "excetera" as the one bad
pronunciation used by illiterate people.

~~~
jeanmichelx
> "excetera" is also a very common pronunciation in French.

Not in my experience. Where are you from?

------
reaperducer
I hope that some YouTube publishers start using this. It's always jarring when
some tech vlogger puts up a video with blatant mispronunciations.

Sometimes it can be attributed to regionalisms (8-Bit Guy uses Texas-isms in
addition to his usual set of mispronunciations). Sometimes it's just not
paying attention, like one video game blogger who mispronounced "Imagic,"
showed an old Imagic TV commercial where the name was pronounced correctly,
and then mispronounced "Imagic" immediately after. But some simply aren't
bothering to look up the correct pronunciation of things.

/Former broadcaster, trained in pronunciation, and in correcting the
pronunciation of TV news anchors.

~~~
unixhero
Some other guy being so nasal he can't pronounce monsters and it comes out as
bonsters.

------
ldjb
I like that this website offers a variety of pronunciations for each word. A
lot of websites people use for pronunciations will provide a single
pronunciation they deem to be correct, whereas there are multiple
pronunciations in actual use.

------
Mindless2112
[https://youglish.com/search/raison%20d%27%C3%AAtre/all](https://youglish.com/search/raison%20d%27%C3%AAtre/all)

Not exactly English, but it's in the dictionary. I don't know if I should be
impressed that the first result actually sounded pretty reasonable or
disappointed at how bad some of these pronunciations are.

Of course, the whole thing is gonna be "results may vary", I suppose...
[https://youglish.com/getcid/25032799/electrophoresis](https://youglish.com/getcid/25032799/electrophoresis)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
If it's in the dictionary it _is_ English. Or do we start throwing out
everything we got from Norman French too?

[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/raison%20d'etre](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/raison%20d'etre)

------
clarkmoody
I wonder if language pronunciation will drift less over time, given the
technology to record the spoken word and play it back at a much later day? Any
linguists on HN thinking about vowel drift in the digital age?

~~~
elliekelly
I also wonder if technology could have the opposite effect of expediting the
adoption of “new” pronunciations only among certain demographics. It’s not
linguistics (or maybe it is?) but the number of 20-something women speaking
with vocal fry seems to have increased thanks to pop culture/the Kardashians.

------
calibas
Here's a good one:

[https://youglish.com/search/triskaidekaphobia/all](https://youglish.com/search/triskaidekaphobia/all)

Every person pronounces it differently.

~~~
noja
These people pronouncing just that word pronounce it the same:
[https://forvo.com/word/triskaidekaphobia/#en](https://forvo.com/word/triskaidekaphobia/#en)

~~~
calibas
Listen again. The British one pronounces "ai" differently, and the American
ones put emphasis on different syllables.

------
jlengrand
Sounds cool! Funny thing : the first thing I was greeted with was "How to
pronounce coup de grâce in English (1 out of 23)". Being French, I do find
that a little hard to swallow :D

------
philshem
The word _biopic_ comes from “biographical picture” and shouldn’t rhyme with
_myopic_. I only learned this recently. But, alas, on a website for correct
pronunciation...

[https://youglish.com/search/Biopic/all](https://youglish.com/search/Biopic/all)?

Here’s forvo, for contrast:

[https://forvo.com/word/biopic/](https://forvo.com/word/biopic/)

------
thisisananth
Wow.. This is amazing. As someone who mispronounces lot of words because of my
education in Indian English which takes most of the sounds from British
English, this is very helpful. Though there are google and merriam websters
dictionary, sometimes it is not easy to get the pronunciation in a sentence.
This fills that gap! I'm also curious know how it is implemented. Thanks & all
the best!

------
myfonj
Google Dictionary (that one you get while querying "define word") has nice
collection of record samples from native speakers (unlike Google Translate
where samples are synthetized). I like to compare British and American
accents. (Let's say I use two browsers with distinct language preferences.)
Some US samples are performed by lady with unbelievably charming voice.

------
pieter_mj
I tried to find the American English pronunciation for 'agile', thinking it
would be the same as in 'fragile' (silent i and e at the end), but for all
examples, the 'i' is pronounced like in 'isle'. Can anyone chime in with the
correct AE pronunciation?

My English Dictionary corresponds to what i expected, but it is different in
practice it seems.

------
nimrody
I've always struggled with the pronunciation of the word "route" and this
doesn't seem to help. Try:

[https://youglish.com/search/route/us](https://youglish.com/search/route/us)

vs

[https://youglish.com/search/route/uk](https://youglish.com/search/route/uk)

------
OrgNet
[https://youglish.com/search/Worcestershire/all](https://youglish.com/search/Worcestershire/all)

[https://youglish.com/search/Quinoa/all](https://youglish.com/search/Quinoa/all)

------
autoexec
If this works for names I'm going to try to win a 30 year old bet with
"Raistlin Majere"

------
Ivoirians
I can't stop playing with this. Plugging in foreign words and locations is
pretty fun, like Nouakchott, N'Djamena, Lviv, Hagia Sophia, Ibiza, Louvre,
etc. Just getting the variety of organic, candid pronunciations is
fascinating.

------
konamicode
One of the harder things with English pronunciation I found was to be able to
correctly vocalise "warm" and "worm", "crap" and "crepe" and similar. Think a
resource like this would have helped.

------
abdusco
Really cool site, I can see myself using this extensively for learning German.
One cool "feature" is that I get to see videos on various topics that I
wouldn't normally search for. Invaluable for training the ear.

------
jonwinstanley
Unless you want to know how to say "Notre Dame".

[https://youglish.com/search/notre%20dame/all](https://youglish.com/search/notre%20dame/all)?

~~~
hathawsh
If you're talking about the University of Notre Dame in Indiana USA, the most
common pronunciation is /noʊtrəˈdeɪm/ or /noʊtərˈdeɪm/ (NOH-tər-DAYM). Simon
Whistler's video uses both the American and French versions appropriately:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhPDprqB_c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhPDprqB_c)

------
vkhorikov
[https://translate.google.com/#en/](https://translate.google.com/#en/) has
this feature too. Its pronunciation is perfect most of the time.

------
tabtab
I tried Youtube, but only learned to meow and play 80's song on piano.

------
martyvis
It works well with the two words "segue" and "awry" as native 50+ year old
Aussie English speaker that I only connected the spelling and pronunciation in
the last 10 years or so.

------
artificialLimbs
Very nice tool.

I've been replaying every Whatsapp/Signal/Messenger voice message I send to
listen to how I speak, and it has helped me quite a bit with enunciatng.

This will be a welcome addition to my grammartoire.

------
luqa
the website name doesn't make it obvious, but they support 7 languages.

There's a little dropdown on the right of the big "Youglish" logo.

I tried it in Italian (my native language) and it works extremely well.

------
Oras
I will use this a LOT. This is the website I always wanted to have! I've
tested different words and its quite accurate.

I would suggest having the auto-completion for words just like Google search.

------
open-source-ux
This is really helpful even for speakers of English since there are so many
ways to pronounce the same word between countries and even within a country.

For example, try comparing UK and US pronunciation of these words:

\- herbs

\- route

\- privacy

------
known
[https://forvo.com/word/scheduled/#en](https://forvo.com/word/scheduled/#en)
is very interesting

------
skynetv2
I typed in "what is my name?" and it took me to a video of a southern
preacher's sermon. lol

------
richrichardsson
"Improve your American pronunciation".

Search term : Aluminium

Result : American saying Aluminum

Search term : Solder

Result : American saying "sodder"

~~~
taejo
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You can argue that "aluminium"
and "aluminum" are two different words, each pronounced the same way in
Britain as in the US, but with the former being common in Britain and rare in
the US and the other vice versa.

But there is only one word "solder", and in most of the US it's pronounced
like "sodder" would be, if that were a word at all.

~~~
mkl
I think they're trying to say it's American-focused, rather than English-
focused. A search for "aluminium" returning pronunciation for "aluminum"
contradicts your idea.

Leaving the "l" out of "solder" is just bizarre to me as a New Zealander :-)

~~~
taejo
Ah, that makes sense. If you want exclusively British pronunciations, you can
choose that option. I think it's equally reasonable to say that "aluminum" is
the US pronunciation of the single word "alumin(i)um", I was just trying to
divine GGP's argument.

"Sodder" was equally bizarre to me when I heard it.

------
jaimex2
This could be a good way to build a large tagged dataset to train a neural net
TTS engine.

------
DyslexicAtheist
this is awesome, but I feel Scottish and Irish accents are underrepresented as
per usual. Would you mind adding some videos from Kevin Bridges, Franky Boyle,
Dara O'Brien, Chris O'Dowd and Dylan Moran pleeeeeease?

------
polyterative
Man I wish I had this when learning English. I want it for German

------
quadrature
Love it, does anyone know of a similar service for chinese ?.

~~~
sideral
There is Chinese in the dropdown list.

------
flixic
Searching for “gif” left me even more confused than I was.

------
mullikine
This is very useful for searching youtube subtitles.

------
DutchSysOps
It sometimes work for me to learn new words :-)

------
vitorgrs
Interesting, works even for pt-br vs pt-pt!

------
reeves23423
How did you even come up with this idea ?

------
enz
Thank you for this valuable work.

------
maerF0x0
very cool!

next features: 1) Find the videos that most agree with eachother and 2) Add
other languages

~~~
bhelkey
The site appears to support 7 languages in the rather hard to see dropdown
near the youglish logo.

------
TadaScientist
lets try "data" and "finance".

dei·tuh not da ta fai·nans not fi nance

------
pacomerh
damn this is very useful, congrats

------
333c
I wouldn't normally point this out, but considering the site is about learning
languages, the mistake on the homepage:

> (Advance search)

is glaring. That should be "Advanced search" as in "click here to perform an
advanced (adj) search," not as in "click here to advance (verb) [a] search,"
which is nonsensical.

~~~
mnw21cam
Okay, context makes you mostly right. But. Advance is also a adjective, as in
"Advance booking", which is a booking in advance. Lots of people incorrectly
write "Advanced booking" instead, which is a technologically superior booking,
and probably not what they meant.

~~~
333c
Advance as an adjective (as in advance booking) means "ahead of time," whereas
advanced as an adjective (as in advanced search) means "highly developed or
complex," which is what is appropriate here.

I was not trying to suggest in my original comment that "advance" as an
adjective was inherently incorrect. All I was saying was that the phrase
"advance search" is meaningless.

