Usefulness of YouGlish in studying pronunciation and common expressions

Hello, everyone! Your lovely BP is back! 👻👻

In this blog, I would like to introduce a new website YouGlish. 

YouGlish is a very useful tool for practising pronunciation and new word expressions. It looks through Youtube videos for examples of the words, namely, how English is spoken in the real context. The following is the interface of YouGlish.

Here is the link: https://youglish.com/

Step 1 General Intro

YouGlish serves not only English learners but also other languages like Chinese, French, Spanish, etc.

Click on the green area to select a certain language.
Click on the blue area to choose different English language varieties such as British English and American English.
Type in what you want to search for and click on "Say it" to start retrieving.

Step 2 Pronunciation practice with YouGlish 

Do you have experience that students asking you about the pronunciation of "neither"? Did they wonder why some people pronounce it as [ˈnaɪðə(r)] while others pronounce it as [ˈniːðər]? Similar questions are like the different pronunciations of "often" between [ˈɒf(ə)n] and [ˈɒft(ə)n].

YouGlish will tell us the answers.

The following video shows how American people pronounce "neither". There are two out of ten usages of [ˈniːðər] and seven of  [ˈnaɪðə(r)]. We can generally estimate that [ˈnaɪðə(r)] is the more common pronunciation in the US. 

In contrast, British people seem to be more used to the pronunciation of [ˈnaɪðə(r)], with seven out of ten pronounced in this way as shown in the video.

Step 3 Common expressions practice with Youglish 

This function can also serve to identify the different expressions in different regions. For example, "on the weekend" and "at the weekend" almost represent the same meaning. As can be known from the following searching results, "on the weekend" (1 out of 1975) is much more popular than "at the weekend" (1 out of 798) in American English. However, in British English, the two expressions witness a half-half ratio.

Additionally, the video-based context is more interesting and attractive to learners than the text corpus.

This is easy to understand since the characters' tones, attitudes, and expressions on their face immerse us in the context so that we can immediately get the point. 

By the way, if you are careful enough you will find that YouGlish also provides captions right below the video in case of some listening problems.

That's all for today's blog~ Hope you guys find it useful for English teaching and learning. The following video comments on the YouGlish from a critical review. I think it might be your interest for more careful consideration.

In case of any insert error, here is the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM8hBuArRe0

Again, any of your comment is welcome!👂👂