Learning English Can Be A Stressful Business

When an English word contains more than one sound, income, output, profit, profitability, production, moneytising,one of the sounds is spoken with a little more energy than the others. This energy is called stress.

The pattern of stressed and unstressed sounds is one of the things that makes English sound English. So, when you learn a new word in English, as well as learning its spelling and meaning, it’s a good idea to learn which sound in the word is stressed. Fortunately, any decent dictionary will give you this information as part of the phonetic spelling. You don’t need to understand phonetics to see where the stress comes in the word.

And, of course, you can learn to hear the stress by listening to English speakers.

The good news is that, once you know which sound to stress in a word, the stress will be the same whenever you use that word.

Two things to bear in mind. First, different kinds of English such as American or Australian, will stress different sounds in a word. The same is true for different English accents. But, in each kind of English the sounds that are stressed will be consistent. Some dictionaries will give the American English alternative pronunciation with its stress.

                                                Second, there are words that look the same but are stressed differently depending on the job the word is doing. For example, impact is a noun. ‘Your website has had a great impact.’  But impact is a verb, ‘This will impact on the bottom line’. Or, ‘The site has had a reboot’ (noun) or ‘We are going to reboot the site’. (verb). Again, a dictionary will help you with this.

Learning English can be stressful but, if you learn which sounds to stress in English words, the task can become much easier.  Next time, I’ll talk a bit more about stress. Have a stress free day now.