Today on English Win, I will tell you
about something so important to your
English speaking pronunciation skills.
and that skill is stress. Syllable
stress. So the rules I show you here
will work - most of the time - but there are
some exceptions. I may put those
exceptions - those irregular words - in a
different video, maybe in the future, but
until then, let's go over the rules that
cover most words you will see... especially
with American English pronunciation.
First off, one syllable words words, like
this: bat, arm, cheese, check, sky. Those are
pretty easy; you just say the word.
There's no syllable stress because each
word is just one syllable. Now, we're
going to go to something a little more
complicated: two syllable words. Are you
ready? Let's go. Two syllable words are a
little harder. They're words like: elect,
baseball, office, visit, drama, dirty. So two
syllable words can be put into three
different categories. You have Nouns,
which are basically names and titles for
things. You have Verbs, which are actions
- things that are done. And then you have
Adjectives, which are words that describe
a noun. Let's explain how you use the
syllable stress for each of these kinds
of two syllable words. Now, for the noun,
it's going to be the FIRST syllable that
gets the stress, like THOmas instead of
ThoMAS. ToMAS is Spanish, but this is
English, so THOmas; that's a name. Let's go
for an object here... TAble, okay? That's a
two syllable word... TAble... TAble... that
first syllable; you hear how it gets the
stress?
TAble? Very good.
So those are nouns. Now for verbs. So
nouns get the first syllable... I can show
you this with some examples. Words like:
baseball, office, visit, whiteboard. Next, we
have verbs. Now, two syllable word verbs
will rely on the second or last syllable
for their stress. Words like: elect, agree,
prepare, compose. Can you see it? I think
you can, so let's move on.
Adjectives. Adjectives are like nouns, in
that the first syllable gets the
stress.
You'll see this with words like: dirty,
common, special, priceless. So now we're
going to go into something a little bit
more complicated. These are going to be 4+
syllable words. You're going to see
endings that are very specific to these
four syllable words. I'll show you on the
board. You should see endings like -CY, -TY,
-PHY, or -GY. Those are pronounced SEE TEE PEE
and JEE. Now, with these, the third from the
last syllable gets the stress. Let me
show you what I mean:
democracy. You see, that's a four syllable
word: de mo cra cy, and it's the third
from the left, so we have deMOcracy - that
means this one right here - ma, gets the
the syllable stress. Democracy, okay?
Here's some more examples: photography,
philosophy, cardiology. Now we get
basically into words that have Latin or
Greek roots, especially those compound
words from ancient Greek; they're going
to have words ending with those endings,
so this should help you pronounce a lot
of those larger words. And that even
works with larger words... bigger than four
syllables, like endocrinology.
That's a medical term, in case you're
wondering. Let's move on. Now there's some
three syllable words that end in either
AL or LE - pretty much the same sound. Here are
some examples: acceptable. Like the four
syllable words, it's the third from the
last syllable that gets the stress.
Acceptable. Next, functional, logical. And
thanks to 'The Logical Song' by Roger
Hodgdon from Supertramp for those words.
Alright, we're going to go to the next
set of words here. Last we have words
that end in either -tion (chun) or sion (shun).
A lot of these are Latin roots, and
so it's the second to last syllable that
gets the stress on these particular
words. Let's look at an example word:
attention. You see the (Chun) tion at the
end? That's the last syllable. We go back
one more syllable... ten. Attention. You see
how the second to last syllable gets the
stress? Very good. Let's look at some more
examples: tension, abrasion, friction,
contraption. Very good. Now these don't
give you all the tools you need to
pronounce every word with proper stress.
But hopefully, it clears up a lot for you,
and it will make things a lot easier in
the future for you to pronounce things
when you read and when you speak. So
that's it for my introductory video on
syllable stress. If you liked this video,
please SUBSCRIBE. Tell me if there's any
words you have trouble pronouncing. I
want to hear
about them down in the comments below.
Check out my pronunciation playlists and
idioms playlist. And until then, keep
winning English Winners. I'll see you
later