“Gonna” appears 13.1 times per 10,000 words of English YouTube speech and shows up in 28% of videos, about 14 times as often as “wanna”. The filler “you know” is even more frequent, at 14.6 per 10,000 words.
Key findings
- gonna: 3,216 occurrences, 13.1 per 10,000 words, in 28% of videos.
- you know (as a filler): 14.6 per 10,000 words, in 32% of videos.
- 32% of English videos contain at least one of the reduced forms counted here.
- B1 and B2 videos use the most reduced forms and fillers; C1 videos (talks and explainers) the fewest reduced forms.
Which forms you will actually hear
Textbooks teach going to and want to; real speakers say gonna and wanna. Of the reduced forms, gonna dominates: learn to hear it first. Forms seen fewer than 10 times in the whole corpus are left out of the table (they are in the CSV).
For how these forms sound and how to train your ear on them, see textbook English vs the English you actually hear.
| Form | Stands for | Occurrences | Per 10,000 words | Share of videos |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| you know | filler | 3,578 | 14.6 | 31.7% |
| gonna | going to | 3,216 | 13.1 | 27.8% |
| I mean | filler | 1,710 | 7.0 | 23.0% |
| um | filler | 1,236 | 5.0 | 14.0% |
| uh | filler | 733 | 3.0 | 12.1% |
| gotta | got to | 423 | 1.7 | 9.3% |
| wanna | want to | 237 | 1.0 | 3.3% |
| 'cause / cuz | because | 221 | 0.9 | 3.8% |
| y'all | you all | 128 | 0.5 | 2.7% |
| ain't | isn't / am not | 72 | 0.3 | 2.1% |
| kinda | kind of | 36 | 0.1 | 0.8% |
Reduced forms and fillers by CEFR level
Casual vlogs and conversations at B1–B2 carry the most of both. A1–A2 videos, often scripted for learners, have fewer fillers; C1 videos are mostly prepared talks, so reduced forms almost disappear while fillers stay.
| Level | Videos | Reduced forms | Fillers |
|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | 225 | 15.9 | 18.7 |
| A2 | 530 | 15.0 | 14.6 |
| B1 | 778 | 21.8 | 34.1 |
| B2 | 502 | 19.0 | 36.7 |
| C1 | 105 | 5.0 | 29.7 |
Method
- Corpus: the 2,146 English videos (2,447,824 words) from YouTube creators processed by LingoDew up to 2026-10-16.
- Each form is matched as a whole word in the subtitle text, ignoring case. “you know” is only counted as a filler: questions and clauses such as “do you know”, “if you know” or “you know what” are excluded.
- 1,950 of 2,146 videos (91%) use LingoDew's automatic transcription, the rest the creator's own captions. Both often write the full form (going to) when a speaker says gonna, and drop some hesitations such as um and uh, so every count here is a floor: you will hear these forms more often than they are written.
- Levels are the difficulty labels LingoDew shows on every video (JLPT N5–N1 for Japanese, CEFR A1–C2 for English). They are estimated from vocabulary, grammar and speed, and some are reviewed by hand. Levels with fewer than 20 videos are left out.
Download the data
Text, tables and data are free to reuse underCC BY 4.0: credit “LingoDew” and link to this page.