A PSA for your langauage sanity and health

[lightcrystal]

I have to, on my conscience, warn people.

There is a YouTube channel that has a gazillion views. In it a Frenchman tells people how to say certain words. But he says many of them wrongly. Sometimes atrociously. I worry that people are going to find a wordin their LibriVox readings and use his site to get the pronunciation. I won't say what the site is; I don't want you to go there.

Please. Don't. I am qualified on three language things. English in general, Australian English and to some degree, Mandarin Chinese as a second language.

His English is mixed. He gets Melbourne right. But he gets the airline QANTAS wrong. It's said kwontus. No one says it like he said it.

But it's his Chinese, Italian and Japanese that are absolutely atrocious. Metatron, a language teacher, has covered the Italian and Japanese. He covered the Chinese too. Let's take the word for yellow [ignoring tones for now], Huang. I can assure you that he says Huang abysmally. I have said it. I have heard native Chinese people say it. It's also a common Chinese surname. The Italian made Metatron's ears bleed [Metatrron is Italian]; the Chinese made my ears bleed.

Can we put together a list of respectable language word sites to avoid the one above?

p.s I need to learn the IPA. But if you said kwontus for QANTAS either way it would still be OK; it would be miles better than the French "now you know[?????]" guy.

[TriciaG]

Ha! This reminds me of this classic: https://librivox.org/english-as-she-is-spoke-by-pedro-carolino/

We've got a couple wiki pages with pronunciation guides:
https://wiki.librivox.org/index.php?title=English_Pronunciation_Guides
https://wiki.librivox.org/index.php?title=Foreign_Words_Pronunciation

They haven't been updated in a while, so I don't know if all the links work or not. But it's a good start.