How English Works #8
How English Works 8
Sentence 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 and today we're going to talk about how English works. These videos are not your typical grammar lessons. We're not going to be doing any drills, no charts, and certainly no memorization. My goal here is to help you understand English and how it works and what it means. You'll learn these things then by understanding them, finding them and going, Oh, I get it. And so today, the thing that I want you to get is sentence stress. Because this is something that's, I think, really cool in English. And when you learn about it, you're going to start hearing it in a lot more places. It's also a very important thing for sounding like a native speaker or for sounding like somebody that really has a good command of English. So, what is, first let's talk about stress, right? We've talked about word stress before, and that's where you say a part of a word stronger and louder, right? So sentence, not sentence, sentence. It's sentence, right? Or it's English, right? English, grammar, duh-duh, understand, duh-duh-duh, right? There's these bounces, there's these top points in the words. but that's on words. The thing is, English also does it on sentences in a pretty interesting way. So, if we look at a sentence, the example that I learned with when I was learning about this was, I don't like it that much though, let's see. Let's see. We're talking about, Okay, I need a basic sentence. I went to the market today. Let's do that. I went to the market. Let's just say, I went to the market. It fits better. Also, you try to come up with a sentence off the top of your head, it's weirdly difficult, okay? So don't judge me. So first, let's just listen to it, right? I went to the, I went to the market. I went to the market. I went to the market. I went to the market. So we have these higher points. I like to put them above and below. So we have, I went to the market, right? Those are all the syllables. We can clap those out. I went to the market. But the thing is, in English, they're not all the same. It doesn't go, I went to the market. There's a pretty big difference in how you say certain syllables, right? So, I went to the market. I went to the market. You hear how there's sort of a d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d- But the interesting thing is that we will speed up these parts of the sentence that have more in order to keep the rhythm relatively similar. So the spaces between them. What? Spaces between them? Let's look at another example really quickly. Similar one, but we're gonna say, I am going to go to the store. Great. We have a sentence, pretty normal sentence. You could say that to somebody and they're gonna understand you just fine, right? I am going to go to the store. But that's not how a native speaker would say it, right? Somebody would just say, I'm gonna go to the store. I'm gonna go to the store. I'm gonna go to the store. That's all you get, right? Because the sentence stress ends up falling on a certain key words. Whoop, go away. So there's some key words in here, which are go and store. You could kinda think of like I'm, but like, or I am, or something like that. But honestly, that's pretty clear from context, and it's not really that important. But that means that we have to put all of this into a sentence together with these sort of two stresses, right? But the thing with English is that we tend to try to make each chunk about the same amount, about the same length, about the same time, basically. So that means we have to really smush this all down together, right? So you might get something like, I'm a, Go to the and then this is might be go to the well, how do you like Does or something like that and then store right so you get this sort of very different sentence? I'm Anna. I'm Anna. I'm Anna. I'm Anna Go to the store. I'm going to go to the store. I'm going to go to the store. And that sounds perfectly natural. I'm going to go to the store. I'm going to go to the store. There actually, now I'm saying it more, there's kind of a bit of stress here because go also isn't that important of a word. And, ah, I got rid of too much stuff. There we go. Because go also isn't that important. It kind of gets the stress mostly on store and then a little bit on I'm because that's just the end, right? But the idea of having certain stressed words still stands. So let's look at another sentence. Let's look at another Sentence. Oops. Sentence. Okay, I ran out of space. Pretend that says sentence correctly. Well, here, wait. I can move stuff over. This is not pen and paper. There we go. Sentence. So, now, we have several options for what the stressed words are. And stressed words are kind of up to the speaker. There's no hard and fast rule about what has to be stressed and what doesn't have to be stressed. It can all change on context. Um, but typically more important words, key words are stressed and not important words are unstressed, right? So let's look at another sentence. That's how I'd probably stress this sentence. Let's look at another sentence. Um, and by the way, the strong part of a word is what gets the stress. So that part is a lot weaker, but yeah, I'm just going to circle the entire word for now. So let's look at another sentence. You could easily just as easily say, let's look at another sentence. Let's look at another sentence. But that slightly changes the meaning and it's more up to the speaker. You could even say, let's look at another sentence and that changes the stress from sentence to here. Let's look at another sentence, but that is adding additional stress to say, this word is important to this sentence. That's what I want you to take away from this. I think stressing really pulls the attention to a certain word or part of a sentence. And when you're listening to me, I want you to also try to listen to the words that are stronger in the sentences, because a lot of the things in between end up getting really smushed down. Go back and listen to that sentence I said where I said in the, in the, in the, in the. So this is why stress is so important, is that it really changes the vibe of a sentence and the meaning. So, here we see, let's look at another sentence. Let's look at another sentence. Let's look at another sentence. And you get this sort of flow of stress. This isn't, again, this is not a science, it's not a perfect system. It can change, it morphs, it adds things, it changes things, it depends on the person, their dialect, but you're generally gonna hear much stronger words and much weaker words, and those weaker words are gonna change size, basically. So it might, to you as a foreigner, seem really weird. Why can you say I, or rather, why does the phrase I am going to become um-uh-nuh, um-uh-nuh? That doesn't make sense, right? This is four words and this is a bunch of sound, right? But the thing is, this is a set phrase. This is basically one word. And so that whole word gets weakened on its own because it's just helping this verb become in the future right it's saying i'm going to go to the store right we don't say i'm i go to the store or we would we say i'm going to go to the store right so it just becomes i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna go to the store right there's tons of these right let's we don't say let us look we just say let's right, because that s, or that s rather, does not need to be there, it's a weak word, and we wanna make more space for these strong words, so let's just smush it together, right? Lots of languages do this in various ways, whether it's removing entire words just because it's implied, it's everybody knows that it's there, or also changing pronunciation like we do, or having different elisions between words, there's plenty of ways that this happens in languages. But the English one is pretty interesting to me because of this different stress. The fact that there are certain words in sentences that get a lot stronger. You can even hear it right now in my own voice. I have a lot of these words that are really stressed and it doesn't really sound that unnatural. I can do it so that it sounds unnatural, but generally when you speak with somebody, you're gonna notice, oh, they do it too, it's just a little more natural, right? It's the same sort of thing. So that is what sentence stress is. I'm not gonna try to go into weird complicated rules and how to do it because it's generally based on what's important and moving things around and make more space. So listen to people speaking English and try to hear how they stress words. What kind of patterns do they use? Do they have any places where they break the rules or that they add new rules in order to change information? I'd be very curious to know, but I think that's everything for today. I think we covered pretty well sort of sentence stress, gave you a rundown of it so that you can at least start to understand it and hear it in your immersion. But if you have more questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below or request other videos for how English works. I have ideas, but I'd love to make things that you want to know about. So let me know down in the comments below. But that's everything for me. Have a great rest of your day, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
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