As a non-native English speaker, the "randomness" of English pronunciation has been a source of frustration for me for many years.
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 is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
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.
>English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
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)
You are partially right in that Italian is not perfectly phonetic, but it's in such a different league from English that (100% - Italian) is a rounding error with respect to (sanity -English) ;-)
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".
>The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.
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.
This is 100% correct. Muscles that aren't used in your mouth/articulators (because your native language doesn't require them) atrophy over time. It is possible to strengthen these muscles with isolated practice -- on BoldVoice we have coach videos where they give you "reps" of muscle movements (such as 20 tongue-ups). We call it "a gym for your mouth" :D It's hard work, but it's the best way to get results.
> There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
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
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.
Oh, it's a huge effort! These bodies meet and discuss what the proper spelling of words should be, or they make up new words, and then they publish those guidelines for journalists, authors, and anyone who wants to speak "properly" to follow.
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.
I don’t think that the existence of those bodies is the reason for being able to pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written.
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).
Most of these are just pretending to have any authority.
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.
Practice and willingness to fail and clown around is key. As an english teacher I've always liked to bring up cross-lingual interference - you're always going to accidentally bring in sounds from your own language into the one you're learning.
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.
The set of meaningful sounds (phonemes) is pretty conservative though. They can be rendered very differently (and that's what we call "accent" in native speakers), but it's like moving a densely connected graph around in the soundspace — yes the particular sounds might shift, but it's the relation between them that encodes meaning, and that is preserved. In that sense "English pronunciation" does exist.
> There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
Well well... as it is called English, scholars from cultural institutions rooted in England are the reference. Everybody else is free to speak their own language, but one is proper English, while the others are at most somewhere-English.
That’s a particularly bad example, as accents vary more within England than in most other English speaking countries. Cockneys and Geordies sound nothing alike and there is no way to have unified and consistent spelling between them.
Don't worry; English pronunciation can be mastered simply through tough, thorough thought.
(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.)
I have seen similar joke poems but this one was too much for me. I even saw words I never heard of before, like "sward". For anyone like me - it's a lawn or a meadow.
> word like "color" has two "o" letters but neither of them makes an "ou" sound
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.
This is completely incorrect. "Color" was spelled "color" in England throughout its history. "Colour" was a later variant that came along later and existed alongside "color" for many years. America eventually standardized on the "color" variant and the UK standardized on the "colour" variant. If you have any doubts about this, you can search on books.google.com for +"color" and look through books published in the UK to see that this is the case. For example, here is a book published in 1756 printed in London by an Irishman in which he consistently uses "color":
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."
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.
We get annoyed about having to learn genders of words in other languages. It's just so silly! Then you remember that millions of children pick it up every day.
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.
Native children spend thousands of hours learning language. Just because a child can do it through some of the greatest effort of their lives at that point doesn't make it easy surely?
I definitely didn't mean to say learning languages as an adult is easy because children do it. I've always thought methods like Rosetta Stone are complete crap because, as you say, we don't have thousands of hours to put into this like children do.
But what we do have is the most powerful tool we know for learning: language! Adults use their already acquired language to make learning a new language easier.
What I really meant, though, is there's nothing fundamentally "hard" about most things in everyday language. Being "hard" is quite hard (heh) to define but some things are intuitively hard, for example, playing Stravinsky's Petrouchka is always going to be considered a remarkable achievement for a piano player. But natural languages aren't like this. They are almost by definition easy because they are natural. If it was hard people would figure out an easier way to talk.
I'm based in the US, where it's spelled without the "u". Quite a few examples of this spelling difference - humo(u)r, behavio(u)r etc. Oh and "spelt" is "spelled". Isn't English fun! :)
Even weirder, as a Native American English speaker, I would have spelt that word this way in only this context, but in other contexts it’s spelled this way.
Maybe this is my own idiosyncrasy though and not what others would do. I’ve never even thought about it until just now.
As a native English speaker, I love videos that point out all the details I never think about but must be maddening for non-native speakers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BYmA5V5Cyg
As a Canadian living in the US, this is the bane of my existence. The disappearance of Ts from so many words and phrases irks me:
- 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.
> 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.
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."
I have a strong Jersey accent to the point where I need a separate "work voice". Mostly I just focus on neutralizing the vowels, which has the side effect of restoring the consonants a bit. What I didn't realize was the extent to which the consonants stand out to people.
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.
The one I have most problems with is "Toronto". Every time I've heard it said out loud by somebody from North America, it has sounded like "Turrawnno", with the T's barely audible.
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.
Fwiw this was highly amusing to read. All of these I read in isolation and thought "no I pronounce the t there" then said in a sentance and yeah... youre dead on
Did you forget ann ar?dic - for Antarctic. What is that ?d sound? WHY is that sound?
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 ...
The main issue really is that there are no rules for pronunciation. It's not as bad as reading Chinese (as far as I understand - I tried to learn for a month and gave up :)), but in the same direction going from a language like Turkish or Spanish that are mostly WYSIWYG - the glyphs in the word don't actually tell you how to pronounce it properly.
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? :)
There are some rules in English pronunciation, but there are a ton of exceptions and inconsistencies. To give you an example of a reliable rule: when a plural word ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant, the "s" is pronounced as "z" (eyes, dogs), but when it ends in an unvoiced consonant, it's pronounced as "s" (cats).
Our BoldVoice, we like to teach these rules because they are quick wins for most people. Then, a lot of the hard work comes in practicing and memorizing the many, many exceptions.
Tried BoldVoice right now and almost immediately hit a bit of interpolation awkwardness: “Tomorrow, we’ll work on Practice your consonant skills”. Usually I wouldn’t complain about this sort of thing, but in a language learning app it seems out of place. Learners can be really trusting at the most unfortunate times. (Mozilla’s Project Fluent[1] was built to handle these situations in a localization setting, but you can probably get away with something much simpler.) Seems really slick otherwise. Now if only I could take a placement test so I could justify paying for it... But I appreciate that most—possibly literally all—of your target audience are not me.
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 :)
Oops, that's literally the name of one of our lessons "Practice your consonant skills" hence the awkward string, but I see what you mean. We'll look into handling those more elegantly because I agree, for English learners everything needs to be in perfect English.
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 ;)
Hey, thanks for your interest in checking out the app :) Weird that you don't see the Pricing info on that page - did you tap "Pricing" at the top bar, and then tap the first question "How much does BoldVoice cost?"
Either way, the app costs $150/year or $25/month (or your local equivalent). We have a free 7-day trial so you can try it before you commit.
Software Engineer at Boldvoice here, also learning Mandarin. I've been told my Chinese accent is awful due in large part to misuse of tones and overemphasizing articles like 了. We'd love to build something for all languages but are focusing on just users learning english right now.
Difficult to explain. As far as I remember it always showed the CN subtitles and you could with your mouse always see the translation and the meaning of the single characters.
viki and iq are around 5 USD a months so it could still be worth it.
Thanks! For now, we're laser-focused on English since it's the language that 1 billion people are learning (as non-native speakers). But we'd love to add more languages in the future, stay tuned!
As a native 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.
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.
Yes, this is a great tip. I use it constantly for prepping for interviewing candidates or first meetings with potential business partners. Getting somebody’s name right really starts conversations out well.
It's good too if you're learning another language, as there's 20 languages supported at the bottom of the page. I'm personally excited by the fact I can search for Canadian French specifically
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 actually pronounce it.
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.
That's not an English name. It's the name of a spanish river. Wad is river in Arabic. They pronounce it correctly. It's common that foreign words are adopted and adapted to the host language, but sometimes, specially if they're names, the original pronounciation lingers.
> 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:
This is a fun hoax that was invented 70 years ago, in 1953. It was debunked at least 20 years ago, but it's still more popular than facts.
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.
there's a 3x hill name in Pilton, uk/ on the site of Glastonbury festival
"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. "
My favourite example of this sort of redundancy is the fact that there are numerous rivers in England called the River Avon. Avon is believed to come from the Proto-Brythonic word "aβon" [0], meaning "river".
I did not know it was a river in Spain, coming from the US I had always assumed it was some catholic religious phrase or a mispronunciation of a native word.
It makes me cringe to imagine people saying "GWAD-uh-LOOP" but I guess its not even that bad compared to many mispronunciations
It's a river, a town, a religious icon, a name in Spain and then, when conquistadores from the area went to Mexico, they named another town, another icon... Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is the patron saint of Mexico, so it's a big thing there.
That pronunciation is not so bad. Source: I'm a native Spanish speaker and dated a Guadalupe for years :)
I think it is not uncommon in the US for place names to take on a local pronunciation. It seems to become part of the local identity. For instance, Cairo (kay-roh) Illinois. The locals know how it is pronounced when referring to the city in Egypt, but they will correct you if you pronounce the name of their town that way.
I have always heard "GWAD-uh-LOOP-eh" or "GWAD-uh-LOOP-ay" around where I live but native spanish speakers elsewhere on this thread have said that "GWAD-uh-LOOP" is not that bad of a pronunciation so I imagine it is a highly regional thing.
There's a good reason for that: in English, a trailing e tends to be silent, but also to indicate that the previous vowel is different (long vs. short usually).
So, to an English speaker, "lupe" looks like LOOP, which is different from "lup" which would be LUPP. Those aren't real words of course, so some similar words with this effect might be "flute", "lute", and "glute". "flut" and "lut" aren't words AFAIK (but "flutter" is), but "glut" definitely is, and has the short-u vowel sound as opposed to the long-u that "glute" has.
The pronunciation rules in English aren't very good and are full of exceptions, but speakers are still just trying to apply the rules they know, based on other words they know, to foreign names.
Unless you are in my city, where it is Frome like home. It's probable the whole city is wrong, since the namesake is British, but no one will recognize a Froom street.
I agree with you but nativised nouns are an edge case that you likely can never stamp out without a huge amount of context that would neuter any usefulness the tool has.
Like any tool for language learning its big limitation is the fact that it appears to be writing based.
That's a big part of immersion learning techniques, which even go as far as having you pick a "parent" to binge watch as you will naturally imitate their accent and cadence.
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.
Language (especially spoken language, most especially English) doesn't really have a "right" or "wrong." It has "likely to be understood by receiver" and "unlikely to be understood by receiver."
The real correct answer to anyone's "what's the right way to say...?" question is a probability distribution.
Language do have right and wrong pronunciation and, in many cases, it is also tied to the script. e.g. in Hindi position of tongue, lips and sound from vocal cord is defined for every phoneme.
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.
Same for Hermosa Beach, Los Gatos, and many other CA towns. Even though I speak Spanish, I'm always caught off-guard when someone pronounces these places the Spanish way.
The one that weirds me out is San Pedro, CA vs San Pedro Square in San Jose, CA.
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.
Very interesting! My grandfather had a store in San Pedro, and I always heard it pronounced the way you describe. I live in the Bay Area but have never heard of San Pedro Square. I wonder if it's pronounced more authentically because of (1) the time period in which it was built/popularized, or (2) the local population. I assume that geographic areas named these days are somewhat more likely to be pronounced authentically (at least Spanish-language ones, in areas like CA that now have large Spanish-speaking populations). Also, from a look at Google Maps, it appears there are a lot of Spanish-language businesses in the area. If the area is largely Spanish-speaking, there's a much better chance it would be pronounced authentically.
Nah its pronounced nuclear. A lot of people mess it up but most people pronounce it correctly. Its sorta like library -> libary. Its a common mispronounciation but it is pretty universally recognized as wrong.
That's similar to the technique I sometime use when I hesitate between two spellings or expressions. I do a Google search of both, the one with the most results wins. There is a website called Googlefight that does that for you, but it doesn't seem to work anymore.
It may not be correct by the book (though it usually is), but it is what people use.
other honorable mentions:
puyallup, washington (PYOO-al-ip)
koenig ln, austin, tx (KAY-nig) - though admittedly this one is likely originally german König, and what texan is going to pronounce German words like Germans? aqui bleiben wir with Stolz, y'all
When I first landed up in Austin, Texas that's what I look around the street and went hmmmm, perhaps, I need to learn a tad bit of Spanish -- at-least swear words.
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.
"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.
In fact, I find it strange when Germans, for example, have a 'perfect British accent'. Even I would say it's perfect. Problem is, no one speaks like that... except the Germans. It also goes with grammatical accuracy as well. If any German, or Nordic etc, says "With whom were you speaking" it marks them as a foreigner instantly.
> 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”.
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.)
I use English according to defined grammar rules. It marks me as upper middle class and therefore trustworthy in administrative professional positions, greatly improving my life outcomes compared to someone who is not able to do so.
There's something slightly irritating about German or Dutch people trying very hard to have that perfect British accent. I can't really tell why, but it always seems affected and pretentious. I much prefer the "wooden" (Holzern in German) accent of the Swiss
It sounds too studied, almost a mockery of real native speakers, there's always too much of perfection in the way these learners speak that makes it sound uncanny
Interesting, yeah I can see that. A lot of modern language learning tries to get you to sound natural, but the question becomes, natural where? You start to delve into dialects, when I meet people who learned English naturally from TV and media, they often have a weird blend of dialects that constantly switches, it's kinda fun actually. One minute they have American inflections, next they're Australian etc.
When learning Japanese I was encouraged to pick a person with a dialect I prefer and listen to them a lot, as I'll likely pick up their accent and mannerisms.
RP itself has changed over time, as the wp article notes -- if you tried to speak RP of the 1950s you would definitely come across rather strangely today. Some of the arguments over naming the article mentions is I think a disagreement over whether RP should only refer to that upper class style of speech (and thus be a relatively rare accent today) or if it should be used as a name for what some people would label "Standard Southern British".
A great example of this is Sir David Attenborough. "Planet Earth III" has some excerpts from programmes he made when we all lived in greyscale and you can hear how his accent has changed quite noticeably through time.
Yes and no. I used to have a regional accent that was a soft mix of Lancashire and Yorkshire accents. I now work in south Worcestershire, and the local accent is pretty much modern RP. In adulthood, I softened my accent further towards RP to such an extent that people think I’m local.
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.
"Estuary English" is the closest to the "default" there is today. RP is coded posh, Estuary is "vaguely from around London" without any particular colouring.
I find that the videos aren't usually from "creators" but academic lectures, interviews, that sort of thing. Maybe it depends on the kinds of words you look up, though.
My guess is that it refers to the really "hype" voice that a lot of YouTubers use. Like Mr. Beast, and most Minecraft YouTubers (but usually not ones on Hermitcraft) (source: I've had to listen to my little brother watching Minecraft videos way too much).
It's interesting, all of us interpret it based on the YouTube bubbles we are familiar with:
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.
It may also be just how youngsters talk nowadays, because my teenager's friends have the YouTube voice. (Or maybe their excessive YT consumption is affecting their speaking style.)
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: https://www.linguee.fr. It lets you search for usage of words and shows them in professionally translated context.
PS. Just realized the '...' icon on the transcript frame opens another frame with a scrolling transcript. Very neat!
+1 for linguee.fr which I used extensively while I was doing my DELF B2. Unimaginably useful way to learn how words are actually used, not just grammatically but in what kinds of sentences, what's the connotative value of the word, what kind of mood does it imply. I imagine Youglish is useful for this too.
This will be very helpful to me, as someone who is learning several of the supported languages.
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.
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.
Wiktionary calls this a "hyperforeignism", and if you just copy the YouTube videos, you'd never know the difference...
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?!
Usually it's for the better. The second most populous country that's located in two different continents and doesn't have more than 10% of its population on islands should not be called Turkey (I said Pavo to because I mistakenly thought it was translated like that to Spanish, and meant to emphasize that it was called Turkey which also means the bird). I also don't mind if I don't hear the word "Cocoa" much anymore (thanks Apple for retiring it - this isn't exactly retired but is partly superseded by SwiftUI and UIKit).
The bird seems to be named after the place, so if we fix how we pronounce and spell the place, we should also fix how we pronounce and spell the bird. Although, the bird was never really from the place at all.
It seems Erdogan doesn't want us to, but maybe the people of Turkey want us to at this point. It's not clear whether most like the name change. https://www.quora.com/What-do-Turkish-people-think-about-the... I guess I'm going to keep calling it Turkey.
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.
(wrong: Turkiye/Turkey used to often be called the spanish word for Turkey.) (corrected for second most, as Russia is also in two continents, not sure it's correct)
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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”).
I've never heard that usage of "anymore". Interesting, reminds me of the French word "jamais", which can mean either never or ever, depending on context.
- 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.
You save a syllable, but also the letters SQL are on the unpleasant side of pronunciation. Just like the word "askew" -- it's just not a nice mouthfeel with that particular sequence of sounds.
Wiktionary will go into exhaustive detail (perhaps too much detail) about all the use cases of a word, including example sentences: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronunciation
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 :)
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
The problem is... the English accents are endless!
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.
If I were learning english again I’d aim for good enough pronunciation but with better diction. Plenty of native english speakers have horrible diction. When it comes to accents it’s more like something one is not aware that they posses but only notice in outsiders.
I am aware of my accent, but getting e.g. vowel colours exactly right is just too much work for too little gain. What would be the advantage to matching a specific dialect exactly? I'm not a spy trying to pass as a native.
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.
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
Nothing in the official YouTube API allows you to download captions. Even if you could, you'd be rate limited really hard because the YouTube API does not have any paid tiers and you can get cut off at any point.
Websites like this exist because the eye of Sauron has not yet gazed upon the land.
Well you're in luck, because it supports French too, and dozens of other languages. You can click on the "English" with the little triangle to change the language
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!".
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 you 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.
It depends on what accuracy you aim for. Most of aren't spies that have to 100% pass as natives of the county. It's still nice to pronounce e.g. place names that have irregular spellings (and that's common in lots of languages besides English).
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.
Is there a reason you want to hide your accent? I love varius accents and enjoy hearing different ones as long as the pronunciation isn’t too off that I have to make a super effort to communicate. I see accents as flavor or aroma to language.
If someone speaks in an unexpected accent, even if it's an unambiguous and internally coherent accent so that it's perfectly possible to understand it it takes a few seconds for well-meaning natives to adjust to. It does get tiresome to have to repeat yourself. You want to at least get to the level that if you talk to someone, it registers as English immediately.
Within the UK, you get a whole range of "randomness" (accents). Try listening to this without reading the subtitles for the first time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQGwe2b18UA
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any word really, for example "smooth" can get hypercorrected to "thmooth". French people with a decent english tend to fall prey to hypercorrection, see for example Macron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ03xCX6Tdg
I took the name "Regina" as an example as its pronounced very differently between Canada/UK and US.
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)
I assume in Canada/UK it rhymes with vagina? That's probably because the royal cipher of Elizabeth II was ER, with the 'R' being for Regina (Latin for 'queen'). So I would imagine that people have heard it in that context before.
Just looking at it it looks like it should be pronounced "redgEEnuh".
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.
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.
Without proper knowledge of English phonetics and dialects, this method isn't going to take you very far. For example, in English, vowel length carries phonetic information, whereas in other languages it does not. If you mother tongue happens to fall in the latter category, it's extremely unlikely that you'll figure out how vowel length works, or even that you have to pay attention to it.
That's not true. I use stress timing without even realizing that I'm using it nor understanding what it means, but I can realize when someone doesn't use it. I learned it purely by ear, by mimicking the sounds other people make. More specifically, by copying their cadence.
Yeah, like I said, it's most unlikely that you're using vowel length correctly. You can't copy something you're not aware of. For example, without looking it up, would you say 'quit' and 'quid' are pronounced with the same vowel length or not?
Babies haven't already acquired another language, when they're learning to speak, and so there's no interference. That's not the case when someone learns a second language later in life.
> "Quid" is longer.
Feel free to post a voice recording, so we can check.
Interference doesn't matter if all you're doing is copying what people do with their mouths. You might have more or less trouble performing the movement at the mechanical level (for example a lot of people have trouble doing the French R) or listening for the precise positions of the tongue etc., but just copying what you can hear is trivial.
>Feel free to post a voice recording, so we can check.
Nah. I have no interest in convincing you; honestly accepting to be tested at all is probably more than I should have done. I'm merely relaying a personal experience for your edification. If you can't accept it for what it is then continue as you were.
Interference absolutely does matter. Interference manifests itself in the form of a foreign accent, which most people have when they speak a second language. You're making an extraordinary claim, namely that you're able to speak a second language without a foreign accent. I find your claim extremely unlikely to be true, especially since you provide no evidence and you've shown that you know very little about language acquisition.
"With correct pronunciation" and "without an accent" are not equivalent qualifiers. There's no such thing as the null accent. Obviously I will have an accent relative to any speaker, since I don't live in an English-speaking community and so I'm not copying the exact pronunciation of any single community, but rather approximately averaging the pronunciations of all the speakers I hear.
Like I said, I have no interest in convincing you. If you can't accept what I say for what it is, continue as you were.
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?
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?
Having built a similar website focused on channel level search, I like reading these comments, having the same data as OP and filmot, and realizing they all hit different niches.
I took the website down as "postgres is in fact not all you need", then life hit me, but I credit building it to getting me my current job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Next morning, there's hell to pay. She waited an hour for me.
What happened? "It's Goethe Street, stupid," she says" "G O E T H E"
I had no idea of this super-local pronunciation -- I'd always pronounced the poet's name as "G uh - t uh"
(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):
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.
I am in the latter camp. My Mandarin Chinese accent is really quite good. But I sound like a child.
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.
I agree. I've been speaking (American) English 99% of the time for the past thirty years but still have a noticeable German accent, never get any flak for that. Apparently Joseph Conrad spoke with a heavy Polish accent so that's my excuse.
What's sad is that educated people look down on people speaking "grammatically incorrect" even if their way of speaking is consistent within their group and conveying meaning perfectly. I just call that snobbery.
> but still have a noticeable German accent, never get any flak for that.
My experience of working with Germans in tech is that the accent is actually an asset. It's totally playing into a certain stereotype of all Germans being great engineers. "I mean...he is German...he must be smart!"
Henry Kissinger was also known as a ladies man. Once he was in his hotel room with a pretty woman when a world crisis broke out that required his attention. However, he was not answering the phone, so a desk clerk was sent up to the room. He knocked on the door and said "Mr Kissinger, I have a message for you". From behind the door he heard, "Go avey!" but it was important so he knocked again and said "Mr Kissinger, it is urgent that I speak to you!" and again "Go avey!" so for the third time he said "It is urgent, are you Kissinger!?" and the reply "No! I'm fuckingher! Now go avey!"
My gf's mother told me that joke back in the day, with a very heavy South American accent, but it still worked, maybe a little better because she said "Kissin-gher".
I saw Henry himself just a few years ago, right before Covid, in a NYC restaurant. He's extremely old, but he seemed very together.
You might call him a "statesman", but he wasn't precisely a politician. Also, the post WWII/Cold War era opened the door, so to speak, to a large number of displaced Europeans, scholars, to give advice about East and Middle European issues, advanced science, etc. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Werner von Braun also come to mind.
my German accent only got less notable after speaking a ton of English living in English speaking countries for several years. For some reason losing the accent was way harder than getting rid of an accent in French.
Especially words like 'strength'. If German is your first language there is something about 'r' and 'th' sounds that's so hard to get right.
- If your accent is not noticable, people will assume you have native-like fluency, speak fast and use colloquialisms that you may have trouble understanding. Try to work on comprehension at least as much as accent.
- Everyone in the English-speaking world has an accent anyways. Californians don't speak like Texans, English don't speak like Scottish, there are people throughout the former Commonwealth that speak a version of English that is what "native" means in their country but sounds like acquired language to others.
- When speaking with people who lack fluency in comprehension, better to speak their language if you can, even if you struggle with it. They will have less trouble detecting your incorrect expression. Too often, people who lack fluency in comprehension are afraid to say they don't understand.
I.can often tell people who a fluent non native speakers because I can't figure out where they are from. Different areas have different accents and foreign learners end up with a very understandable accent that is an average that no native speaks.
All countries/languages have multiple accents. My mother was from Devon (and the forties!) and could make herself nigh on unintelligible to me and my brother and I lived in Plymouth (Devon) for eight years.
You are probably familiar with the generic south west of England accent - "aarr me hearties" and all that fake pirate bollocks. Now listen to the greatest Cockney who ever lived - Dick van Dyke - "Cor blimey Mary Poppins. Very different accents. If you drift up north, why not take a detour via Wales - several accents, quite noticeable when put side by side. The midlands has the Black country "yam yam" and Brummie, go east and there is a whole host of the bloody things. Carry on up and you got "eee bah gum" - Yorkshire and more - bear in mind that Yorkshire alone has a larger population than each of the other nations of the UK and is rather more diverse than even many Yorkies think. Lancs, Mancs and Cheshire, oh and don't forget Liverpudlean (find a recording of the Beatles speaking - they are from Liverpool). Nip on up through Geordie land and Cumbria (Cumbric has only recently died out as another Brythonic language). The Borders, where England and Scotland blur somewhat and the it gets a bit tartan flavoured.
Scotland manages to deploy a lot of accents for roughly 5.5M people. Glasgow and Edinburgh are distinguishable for me and they are only about 50 miles apart. There's Aberdeeeeeen and Perrrrrth and many more!
Over in Ireland (the island) there are several accents. The Dublin "brogue" is considered the easiest accent for a foreigner to understand, which is quite ironic. The Republic of Ireland is home to multiple accents as is Northern Ireland (UK).
The accent that D van D deploys in Mary Poppins is generally known as "Mockney" and that pirate thing is a variety of "Mummerset". Mummer is an old word for actor and Somerset is in the south west of England. This comment is getting lengthy, so I won't delve into Cockney rhyming slang, which is worth looking up if you fancy a right larf, me old septic 8)
In the English speaking world, high tolerance for accents does seem to be the norm. My experience is that there are also countries outside of it with a much stronger normative accent seen as the "right" way to speak the language.
Fellow good accent, poor grammar haver (but in Czech) - hello! I agree completely. In fact we are not alone, here’s a video where a YouTuber is praised for his use of English (including contemporary idioms etc) in comparison to someone who has a good accent but comparatively poor command of the language itself: https://youtu.be/-81TSnMUA68?si=4j4mxiSssnQIBVRq
Personally when it comes to speaking English I find a false American or English accent quite unnerving.
I will have to disagree here. I have a South Indian accent and a good grip on grammar, at least when I'm speaking, Most of the native English speakers I encountered had trouble understanding some of the words I was pronouncing even if it was within context.
My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.
I think what the GP means is that if you speak in grammatically correct sentences and are intelligible, people are less likely to complain or look down on you. I.e. that's a deliberate choice on the listener. If your pronunciation is so off that your listener can't understand you then that's something that's outside of their control; either they pretend to understand and go "uh-huh", or they have to ask you to repeat yourself.
>My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.
Nah. People get used to understand certain sequences of sounds and eventually get used to your particular accent, even if initially they had no idea what you were saying. One time I had to work with a Vietnamese woman (let's call her Anna) who said "transaction" like "trunsun" or something; definitely one syllable too few. After several months I was quite able to understand most of what she said, although occasionally I needed her teammate (Barbara) to translate for us. To restate GP's point, both Anna and Barbara spoke grammatically correct English and had definite East Asian accents, but Barbara pronounced things correctly and Anna didn't, so Barbara was easier to speak with, while when speaking with Anna I often had to ask her to repeat herself.
That's been my strategy for a long time and indeed it seems to pay off more than any of my other friends who have a perfect pronunciation but can hardly detect sarcasm or can't write a complex text
The problem I've had with Mandarin is keeping my accent means imparting tones to the words which could change their meaning. But I agree with your general point.
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.