Wanted: practice videos for understanding English language accents with accurate subtitles, or equivalent

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!
HelpMeListen
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2021 11:34 pm
Languages: English (N)
x 5

Wanted: practice videos for understanding English language accents with accurate subtitles, or equivalent

Postby HelpMeListen » Wed Dec 22, 2021 11:48 pm

Wanted: practice videos for understanding English language accents with accurate subtitles, or equivalent

I hope this isn't too far outside the domain of this forum. I am a native U.S. English speaker (though I understand the most common educated British accent fairly well). But as I age, I increasingly have trouble understanding some English language words, as pronounced by some speakers. I have trouble distinguishing phonemes, like "m" vs "n", "t" vs "d", and "aw" fs "a" (in father).

I seek (free) practice comprehension videos to help me understand various English language accents better, with accurate subtitles or closed captions, or equivalent.

So far I have looked on Youtube, but haven't found much suitable. Most videos there to practice English language comprehension have very distinct phonemes, and are too easy to understand. Some practice measure speech comprehension against background random noise or many simultaneous voices, but background TV and movie music and sound effects would be more useful to me.


I’m about 65, and have more and more trouble understanding spoken English. E.g., I have a lot of trouble with Southern U.S. and “Black English” accents, and more with accents outside the U.S., especially India.

An audiologist says my hearing response is flat +/-10dB relative to normal human hearing, up to about 6000 Hz, and drops out altogether by about 8300 Hz in one ear, 10500 Hz in the other. I also have high frequency Tinnitus. I also have some loss below about 40 Hz, and drop out altogether below about 25-32 Hz. (Yes, I had my ears cleaned first.) She says that these are not the frequencies most hearing aids correct, so I am not a good candidate for hearing aids. I had no trouble distinguishing words in a test containing male and female voices, but the accents were similar to mine.

I have tried frequency equalization while listening to TV and movies. It helps a lot, and also improves music quality. But because of background music and sound effects, I often do better if I then boost frequencies between 300 or 400 Hz up to 4000-4200 Hz by 30 or 40 dB, depending somewhat on what background sounds are present. When there are loud low frequency sound effects, it helps to drop everything below 80-100 Hz.

I do not believe my hearing loss is as important to my comprehension problems as is the specific way I learned to distinguish phonemes in the English language accents I heard as a child. I grew up in North Dakota, followed by upstate New York. When I grew up, many American actors and newscasters were taught to use a "Midwestern American" accent, in which all the sounds were very clean and distinct, I think with a very specific pattern of rhythm, accent and speech melody. For the most part there is a pause between words, which is sometimes missing in other accents.

But TV and Movies now include a wide variety of English Language accents, as does conversation in modern day USA, with less clear or different distinctions. It now more often includes
background music and sound effects that are simultaneous with and are often louder than the dialog. So I may be listening for distinctions that cannot be heard above the background. It helps to boost the "Center channel" (reserved for dialog) in surround sound, but most of the sources I stream do not have surround sound.

I am not consciously aware of how I distinguish the sounds of speech, but I believe I use accent-specific patterns of rhythm and pitch a lot. (I listened to music or played a wind musical instrument throughout childhood. Most musicians develop some hearing loss, because we hear our own other others’ sounds louder than a distant audience.)

The sounds I have the most trouble distinguishing:

I expect "m" to be higher than "n", for "m" to last much longer, and for its pitch to rise throughout the syllable. I expect "n" starts with a several millisecond pitch rise, followed by a fall throughout the rest of the syllable.

I expect "d" to be much shorter than "t", and "t" to be accompanied by high frequency hiss. I expect syllables starting with "d" to drop in pitch, but syllables starting with "t" to rise in pitch.

I expect "aw" in saw to be lower in pitch and longer in duration than "a" in "father".

If the information I have is correct, these are not especially consistent with high frequency hearing loss, though high frequency hearing loss makes consonants less crisp. But the patterns of pitch and rhytm I do expect do not all apply to many accents.

I expect terminal consonants to be as clear and long as initial ones.

I hear Indian accent syllables as many syllables, because of pitch modulation. In addition, the pattern of stress and overall melody is a lot different from what I learned. Telephone help desks are often staffed by Indians who are sort of trained to speak with a U.S. accent, and Indians who come to the U.S. often are too, but I still have trouble. (When I listen to English language programs aimed at an Indian audience, I sometimes don’t initially realize it is English. I’ve given up on understanding that.)

I want to practice listening to a variety of English language dialects, using videos that also have accurate subtitles or captions, so I can check my results. (Most TV shows and movies have obviously inaccurate closed captions.)

My learning approach is analytic. But I have no training in linguistics or related fields. So maybe it would help to also learn other people's tricks for distinguishing phonemes. At some point I may learn to lip read. But that wouldn’t always apply.
Last edited by HelpMeListen on Fri Dec 24, 2021 4:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
3 x

User avatar
Axon
Blue Belt
Posts: 775
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2016 12:29 am
Location: California
Languages: Native English, in order of comfort: Mandarin, German, Indonesian,
Spanish, French, Russian,
Cantonese, Vietnamese, Polish.
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5086
x 3288

Re: Wanted: practice videos for understanding English language accents with accurate subtitles, or equivalent

Postby Axon » Thu Dec 23, 2021 7:10 am

Interesting question! Fortunately, there are a lot of English videos with accurate captions on YouTube - they're just not usually marked as being for learners. My first thought is the channel Cut: https://www.youtube.com/c/cut/videos because they have a very diverse group of people represented in each video.

If you do a search on YouTube for any topic you're interested in, you'll see a "Filters" button right above the first search result. Click that, and check "Subtitles/CC" under the "Features" column. Your results will be filtered to only videos that have subtitles added by the creator, which are often very accurate.

Have you tried listening to different genres of music and following along with lyrics on screen? Again, YouTube can be surprisingly helpful if you search for "official lyric video" plus a song name. Fan-made lyric videos almost always have mistakes, but an official video will have the full lyrics.

Some training in the phonetics of different accents may be helpful to you. I think your intuition about which sounds are longer and shorter actually goes against what's commonly taught in terms of pitch and length in English. Learning the International Phonetic Alphabet (there are many resources online for this, including, you guessed it, on YouTube) can give you the mental language to notice what sounds you're regularly missing in words. I'll give you one example - in my native dialect of English, I often turn the "T" at the end of a word into a glottal stop, which is where my throat cuts off the sound instead of my tongue making the "T" sound. I sometimes mishear people whose dialects do that to not only "T" but also "K" at the ends of words! But noticing this pattern and feature made me more likely to understand what I heard later on.

By the way, many, many people have the same troubles as you in terms of distinguishing words on TV and movies. I'm pretty bad at it myself, and I'm virtually hopeless at understanding a new English song the first time I hear it.
3 x

User avatar
Adrianslont
Blue Belt
Posts: 827
Joined: Sun Aug 16, 2015 10:39 am
Location: Australia
Languages: English (N), Learning Indonesian and French
x 1936

Re: Wanted: practice videos for understanding English language accents with accurate subtitles, or equivalent

Postby Adrianslont » Thu Dec 23, 2021 10:28 am

Ted talks and TEDx are a good source of subtitled videos with lots of different accents.

Sometimes the subs are automatically generated but often they are hand made and completely accurate.

Searching for TEDx Sydney will get you Australian accents, TEDx Dublin gets you Irish, TEDx Singapore gets you Singaporean. And so on.

There is a bias towards clearly enunciated, educated speech or maybe general accents but there’s a lot to watch!

And I second Axon’s idea of getting some theoretical understanding through maybe an introduction to English Phonology textbook. I read Peter Roach’s years ago and others could recommend newer ones.

Or maybe just read a bunch of Wikipedia articles on English phonology.

I suspect prosody is one of the things causing you difficulty, not just phonemes.

I am around your age and also have hearing loss. It’s a drag but I think familiarity is a big part of coping with variety in accents - and I have lived for many years in a very multicultural city. I think that has helped.
5 x

HelpMeListen
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2021 11:34 pm
Languages: English (N)
x 5

Re: Wanted: practice videos for understanding English language accents with accurate subtitles, or equivalent

Postby HelpMeListen » Fri Dec 24, 2021 2:58 pm

Wow! Such fast, useful replies! :D

Thanks, guys.
0 x

HelpMeListen
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2021 11:34 pm
Languages: English (N)
x 5

Re: Wanted: practice videos for understanding English language accents with accurate subtitles, or equivalent

Postby HelpMeListen » Fri Dec 24, 2021 4:19 pm

Axon wrote:If you do a search on YouTube for any topic you're interested in, you'll see a "Filters" button right above the first search result. Click that, and check "Subtitles/CC" under the "Features" column. Your results will be filtered to only videos that have subtitles added by the creator, which are often very accurate.

Fantastic!

Have you tried listening to different genres of music and following along with lyrics on screen?...

I sometimes look up song lyrics - though that doesn't always help, because of variations. Your "official lyric video" idea is better.

I wonder if music is always pronounced the same as speech in English. I remember reading that French songs and French speech are pronounced very differently. (E.g., Frère Jacques. A large fraction of French letters are usually silent, and words are often tied together, but apparently not in song.) I suspect the stresses and rhythm pattern of speech and music are often different in English. I remember reading that the melodic line of songs tends to follow the speech melody patterns of the composer's dialect.

Adrianslont wrote:Ted talks and TEDx are a good source of subtitled videos with lots of different accents.
Sometimes the subs are automatically generated but often they are hand made and completely accurate.


Is there a good way to find which are hand made?

I often find automatically generated captions humorous. The available algorithms do worse than I do.

I second Axon’s idea of getting some theoretical understanding through maybe an introduction to English Phonology textbook. I read Peter Roach’s years ago and others could recommend newer ones.

I might take a look at the free English Phonology books on Google Books. Also at your Wikipedia article idea.

I suspect prosody is one of the things causing you difficulty, not just phonemes.

Does "prosody" usually refer to poetry? But I am including speech melody, stress and rhythm. Someone mentioned to me that "cherry cart" has a different melodic pattern, depending on whether cherry is an adjective or attributive noun. I found a webpage that was meant for Russians, possibly for would-be spies, which talked some about the speech melody of English, and explained that English is in many respects a (semantically) tonal language, to an extent I was not consciously aware of. I guess when English is taught as a second language, people cover a lot of things most native speakers do not formally study.
2 x

User avatar
reineke
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3570
Joined: Wed Jan 06, 2016 7:34 pm
Languages: Fox (C4)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=6979
x 6554

Re: Wanted: practice videos for understanding English language accents with accurate subtitles, or equivalent

Postby reineke » Fri Dec 24, 2021 4:54 pm

African English, Kiwi, BrE...

Audio-Lingua - a collaborative bank of authentic audio resources, recorded by native speakers
http://www.audio-lingua.eu/?lang=en
Speech Repository https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/sr/

Backbone multilingual corpus
English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Turkish

Videos, transcripts

http://webapps.ael.uni-tuebingen.de/bac ... search.jsp

Audio and transcripts.
ListeningPractice.org http://listeningpractice.org/
1 x

MapleLeaf
White Belt
Posts: 38
Joined: Mon Nov 01, 2021 8:16 pm
Languages: English (N), French (intermediate), Spanish (beginner), German (beginner), Latin (beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... hp?t=17653
x 164

Re: Wanted: practice videos for understanding English language accents with accurate subtitles, or equivalent

Postby MapleLeaf » Tue Mar 01, 2022 10:00 pm

In addition to the already given excellent suggestions, may I add:

2 x


Return to “Practical Questions and Advice”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests