Hao to practise English speaking with Youglish?

English Varieties

Have you ever been curious about the accents of people speaking English? When I was a child, I was given the concept of British English and American English, yet I was not clear about it at all. When I grew older, I found that people may pronounce a word in different ways and they are all correct.  After knowing the varieties of Englishes in TESOL education, I realised that it is important to accept all the varieties in this global era and know several commonly seen ones. 

Pronunciation of Vocabulary

Vocabulary is the base of Enlgish learning and mastering the pronunciation of words will help to build a solid foundation as well. However, in China, most of the English teachers are not native spearkers and what is more annoying is that even with dictionaries, there might be differences between the phonetic alphabet given in dictionary and the pronuciation of people actually speak in real life. For example, the word 'identify', in American English, people usually drop the 't' sound in it while British people don't. 

However, we can clearly see that 't' in the phonetic alphabet of the word. Another thing is that, even different dictionaries give you different pronuciations of a word. 

Therefore, with only dictionaries, the actual use and pronuciation of the word in reality can not be 100% accurately reflected. So, for a word, how can we know its pronunciation by 'native speakers' in a real context? The most common way is to use an E-dictionary. 

E-dictionary

Of course, with the development of dictionary and technology, we can hear some pronunciation by real people in e-dictionary and most of the time they are accurate and convenient. For example in Youdao Chinese-English dictionary, it gives you the pronunciation of American and British English. 

Howver, such dictionaries also have drawbacks. 

① The original sound examples of words in a sentence are very limited, and some have even no original sound examples. 
② Even if there are sound examples, they do not indicate the accent of the pronunciation. 

To better solve the problems and pracitse English speaking, a powerful tool, 🔗Youglish!, can help you. 

Youglish

Youglish is a tool that provides the correct pronunciation of words in multiple languages based on the massive YouTube video resources. Many YouTube videos have transcripts, which are the essence of Youglish  to search for the word.

For example, if we want to search for the pronunciation of the word 'interesting', we just need to type down the word in the search box, and Youglish will search all youtube videos containing the word and put them together. You will get a huge video library containing the pronunciation of this word. 

🚩8 Advantages of Youglish

🌟 7 Different accents

You can find the original sound examples of words with different accents in different contexts. Click the button below the search box, and you can choose the accent you want. Now, it has got mainly 7 accents, which are US, UK, Australian, Canadian, Irish, Scottish and New Zealand accents. 

🌟 Speed adjustment

Because YouTube itself has a playback speed adjustment function, in Youglish, you can also makes use of this function. The play speed ranges from 0.25 and 2 times of the original speed, which is a great option for English learners to recognise the details of the pronunciation. 

🌟 Big subtitles

In Youglish, the subtitles are enlarged which is convenient to read and know the use of word in the context. Moreover, it's easy to switch between videos and go backwards few second if you miss it.

🌟 Massive resources

You can find massive video resources of one word, which helps you better understand the use of the word. For example, 244851 videos containing the word 'interesting' can be found in Youglish. 

🌟 Convenient to save

Once you have found a sentence that you like very much, you can save it in your account after signing up. You can also categorise them as you like. 

🌟 Not only words but also phrases

In Youglish, you can not only search for videos containing one word but also phrases. This could help you improve your intonation, liasion, reduction and so on. 

🌟 Easy to locate

Because it is easy to find video and column addresses on Youtube, whether you are looking for entertainment information, learning a specific subject, teaching, or other tasks, you can use the URL of the video to find it rapidly. 

In this case, Youglish can also be used as an information searching tool. 

🌟 Totally free

Last but not least, it is a 100% free website! 

At last...

Overall, Youglish is a very useful website which can help you improve your pronunciation and get familiar with the use of words in the context. With the 'record' function, students can practise speaking after listening to authentic materials. However, it would be more wonderful if the website can assess or give feedback to students' record. Another drawback is that it only searches videos on Youtube and I wish to find some lines in the movies to better motivate students in class.