How English Works #5
How English Works 5
Word Stress
Intermediate
In this series, we learn about English grammar differently than usual. There are no charts, no memorization, no confusing rules with millions of exceptions. Instead, we look at interesting aspects of English and how you can understand them. Don't worry if you fully understand. Notice these while you're immersing in English, and it'll all make sense with time.
Hi, my name is Ben. Welcome to How English Works. In this series, we talk about how English works and what things mean. These aren't your typical grammar lessons. We don't do any drills, there's no charts, and there's certainly no memorization. I instead want to talk to you about how to understand real English. How do things work? What phrases do we use and what do they mean? Today, we're gonna be talking about word stress. Oops, word stress, stress, stress. That's how you spell it. Okay, we're good. Word stress. This is something that's really quite important in English, but it's not actually shown on any of the words anywhere. It's something you have to just get used to. You have to just know how words sound. Let's quickly talk about syllables. This is something that's important and this is something that native speakers know. So it's not a weird grammar term or anything like that. Syllable. So a syllable is a piece of language or a piece of a word that is the smallest like chunk that you can pull out, if that makes any sense. When we learn as kids, they say it's the times you can clap in a word. Syllable. If you do it like that, right? So there's three syllables in syllable. Syllable. And that's what a syllable is. It actually has to do with a number of vowel sounds, of different vowel sounds. So if we think about syllable, we have i, u, l. L is a special thing, but there's three different main parts to a syllable. So we get syllable. So that's a three-syllable word, right? Three-syllable word. The word word, one syllable, word. Word, one clap, one syllable, just one. Stress, also one syllable. Understand is three, understand. English is two, and so on and so on. If you want, you can actually look up most words in the dictionary and you'll see some kind of transcription of the pronunciation and see the number of syllables. You might see the IPA, which is a common way of writing sounds, right? So syllable isn't actually in the IPA like that. It's written like this, si. And then sometimes there's like a mark between them, like a dot. I like to do a dot. Si, or actually it'd be rather sil. So we have an L, a dark L there, sil. That's not a dark L. That's a dark L. Sill-uh, which is a schwa-uh, bull. And then this is the last syllable, so that you might see that in a dictionary. There's a lot of different ways to write these, but what you're looking for for syllables is these three, right? You see the three different chunks. However, getting into the real part of this episode, word stress means that every word has one syllable that is the strongest, the stressed, the emphasis. And so in the case of syllable, we know that it's the first one because we start with strong. Syllable, right? Ba-da-ba. So here we have syllable. And you might see in the dictionary a little line like this at the front. Yeah, the front of the stressed syllable. So syllable. And then you know that it's going to be strong, weak, weak. Ba, ba, ba. Right, going to the other examples, understand, understand, da, da, da, and it gets stronger at the end. Like I said, there sort of is memorization here, but you have to just hear what word sounds right. Because memorization is zation, right, da, da, da, da, da. Right, it's not memorization, it's memorization. The place this gets weird in English is when things change a lot. Right. So, for example, we have the word economy. Economic. I can't spell, economical. So three different versions of the same word. So economy is like the thing, economic becomes a describing something, right? And then economical is another way of describing it, right? We have economy, economy, economic, and economical, right? So we have da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, and da-da-da-da-da, right? We just get totally different stress patterns. I like to think of them sort of like this, where we have like line, duh, buh, buh, buh, right? So duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And you can kind of draw a line through it if you want to like think about how the stress is in your mind. But you really have to be able to hear it. And you like have to be able to hear it and understand that we're stressing different parts of the word as like an important part of the word. Like if you say economy, Nobody's going to understand you. Economy isn't a word. Economy doesn't mean anything. Economy does. Economy doesn't. Something that's interesting is some words can actually have two different stressings depending on how they're used, right? So contract and contract. are spelled the same, contract and contract, depending on where the top part is. My dots are confusing here, but this one's contract and this one's contract. The first one, when they have the stress at the beginning, like in contract or object, that is a thing. You're talking about a physical thing in the world. A contract is something you sign, an object is a thing you can hold. but to object is a thing you do. To contract is a thing you do. You contract a disease or you can object to what somebody says, right? And so you can, that's a small rule you can keep in mind, but you really have to listen for the difference. Let's do a couple of trials. I want you to listen to the word that I say, and I want you to think in your mind what is the stressed word here. Sorry, what is the stressed part of the word, rather? That's not how you spell that word. There's one word. There's a second word, and let's do one more. All right, so we have three words here, and I want you to, actually first, why don't you, in your mind, or on a piece of paper or whatever, write down the number of syllables first. Geography. Geography. How many syllables are there? Geography. Geography. Four. Now what's the stressed syllable? Geography. Geography. It's the second one, right? Ography. It's not geography or geography or geography. It's geography. Let's go into tablet. Tablet. How many syllables is that? Two. Tablet. And what's the stressed one? Exactly. Tab. Tablet. Monitor. Monitor. Three, good, monitor. And the stressed one is monitor, mon, right? In these cases, the number of syllables is equal to the number of written vowels, but that's not always true, right? We can look at a word like whole. And we see there's two written vowels, O and E, but they're making one vowel sound, right? The sounds are more important for actually writing out syllables. So, that's what word stress is. Just listen for it, and you will start to learn it. It's an important thing for pronunciation, and if you say the wrong stress, somebody might not understand you, which is sort of annoying, but that's just how language works. We listen for things like pronunciation and stress in order to understand words more easily. We'll talk about sentence stress in another episode. But I actually do quickly wanna talk about, no, that's wrong, because that's a sentence stress thing. We'll talk about sentence stress in another episode of How English Works, so make sure that you subscribe. Oops, go away. Let's see, is there anything else that I wanna say about word stress? Word stress, word stress, word stress. Strong syllable, weak syllables. Oh, yeah, that's a good example. There are many words that in the dictionary, or even just in real life, there's many different pronunciations that have different stressings or different syllable patterns. So a really good example is chocolate. There we go, making sure I spell things right. Because in actual pronunciation, we say chocolate. Choc-let, which is two syllables. Choc-let, which sort of looks like this O is like just out in the middle of nowhere, right? Kinda, we sort of ignore it, but that's just because we pronounce the words first. The writing system of English, the writing and spelling is just kind of old. That's fine, it works for us, but it means that you can't always guess the syllables or pronunciation from this or even from a dictionary. Because in a lot of dictionaries, you're going to see chocolate, chocolate. But nobody really says it like that unless you're from a different part of the world or something like that. By the way, what's the stressed syllable in chocolate? Good, it's the first one. Stressed. Or stressed. Chocolate. Chocolate. And... Yeah, I think we're gonna stop there. I don't really wanna keep going on, and I can't think of anything else that's important to know about word stress. Sentence stress is a lot more complicated, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, but it's also really interesting. We're actually gonna talk a little bit about Shakespeare, one of the most famous English writers of all time, because he uses sentence stress in a very interesting way. He also plays with word stress. and is a little bit of the reason why these words that end in ED, like stressed, the end in this ed, don't have an ed sound. We don't say stressed, we say stressed, which sort of sounds like this is just becoming a T, right? And so if you wanna learn why we do that and what's going on in English and what makes English sound the way that it does, make sure that you subscribe so that you catch the episode on sentence stress. Should be fun. But that's all for me. Thank you so much for watching this episode and I'll see you soon. Bye.
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