Seasoning 7 Bridge You and English --- YouGlish!

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Good morning/afternoon everyone💁! When you come across unfamiliar words or phrases, where will you go to? Dictionary? Corpus? Now you have another choice! Today I am going to introduce a magical English video corpus ---YouGlish!💗


What is YouGlish?

YouGlish is an incredible platform helping EFL speakers improve pronunciation and learn usage of the words in context through thousands of YouTube videos. These are not just spoken by people from the local country though. Users can also get pronunciations from different places around the world. It allows you to pick the area you want from options.

The link is: https://youglish.com/


YouGlish and English learning💬

YouGlish is a facilitator to improve both the accuracy and fluency of spoken English. It is smart enough to trawl all that content to find the word or phrase you want to hear. It then offers a video with that word or phrase spoken in the language you selected. Once you give the keyword or phrase, it can automatically select and showcase all the Youtube videos that include the keyword you typed, and start to play a few sentences near the sentence containing the keyword. From this, users can know how English speakers in the video use the word and under what circumstances they use the word. Users can also guess the meanings from the context and acquire the correct and understandable pronunciation. Besides, since it allows users to select an accent, they can stick to a certain accent without feeling confused. Additionally, you can activate the subtitles to be able to read the words as they are spoken in the video. This can help with spelling as well as recognition of how the word fits into a sentence structure.



Advantages 👍

(1) User-friendliness

The outlay and functions of YouGlish are succinct and clear. Baring the functions mentioned above, another really useful option in the menu allows you to control the playback speed. You can adjust the speed to ‘Normal’ or slow down to hear the words spoken more slowly. You can also go faster if that helps. A handy button featured below the video allows you to go back five seconds so you can repeat a section over and over without having to use the tracker to find that point.

(2) Richness of authentic contents

YouTube has lots of authentic English speaking videos. ‘As of 2020, there are 720,000 hours uploaded daily. That means that if you wanted to watch an hour's worth of uploaded YouTube videos it would take you about 82 years.’ Using YouGlish allows you to take full advantage of these abundant videos to gain a comprehensive understanding of words and phrases.

(3) Customised and appropriate content

If YouGlish is used by kids, it can be run in a 'Restricted Mode' which will block any inappropriate content to be displayed. To activate it, users can click on the 'Restricted Mode' button at the bottom of any YouGlish page.

 

Limitations 👎

(1) Awkward position in learning new language point

Some people do point out that when they come across new words, they can search for them in a more direct and authoritative way, which is dictionaries, especially online dictionaries. It can provide you authentic pronunciation and sentence in context straight away. So why bother to use YouGlish?

(2) Unproven effectiveness on improving listening and pronunciation

People doubt if YouGlish can truly improve students’ listening and pronunciation simply by repeating these video resources time and time again. There is no follow-up check. And it could be time-consuming as well.

(3) Form of monologue

YouGlish asserts it can provide words and phrases within a real context. However, the vast majority of videos are presentation types of videos in the form of a monologue, which is hardly a realistic context for non-native speakers.

 

Example and Tutorial 💪

Here, I would like to explore the idiom: put on a pedestal in American English. As you can see, there are 331 videos containing the authentic use of ‘put on pedestal’.

 

 

And there are also some pronunciation tips for you.

 

Tutorial: 

Without further ado, let’s give it a shot! If you have anything to say, please feel free to comment down below. 💟

Comments

  1. Siyu Ma14 April 2022 at 19:43

    Can I ask a question? If you search, the ‘put on the pedestal’ website will give you the videos at one particular time, or you should search for yourself. Anyway, thank you for your post, I find it quite useful and I will use it to practice my accent.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Daisy's TESOL Planet18 April 2022 at 17:03

      Hi Siyu, YouGlish will show the usage of 'put on the pedestal' at that particular time in the video so you don't need to search for it. It's great to see you might give it a shot!

      Delete

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