Don't let English stress you out!

Hi everyone!

Daniel Tanner here and welcome to my weekly newsletter that helps Italian professionals communicate more effectively with their English speaking colleagues and clients. 💼 

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We all know the feeling. You’ve had a tough day at work, you’re stuck in traffic when you have an important meeting to get to, or maybe the constant calls on your work phone make you want to throw it out the window. 

We all feel stressed from time to time. Well, so do words! Although, not quite in the same way.

Stress describes the emphasis we put on the syllables of a word.

If you’re not sure what a syllable is, try saying the words phone, sunny and exactly with your mouth closed.

Can you hear the individual parts of the word? This number of vowel beats or units you can hear is the number of syllables the word has. Phone has one syllable, sunny has two and exactly has exactly three.

Anyway, back to word stress. Is it really important? Won’t a native speaker be able to understand you anyway as long as you say the right word?

I was with a client not long ago and we were talking about the team that she manages and I asked her how she keeps track of her team and their targets.

She said, “well it depends on their /PERformance/.” She noticed the expression of confusion on my face. She was sure she hadn’t made any mistakes. It was a simple sentence, so she repeated it again. “Their /PERformance/, that’s how I know if they’ll reach their target.”

“Oh!” I said, “their perFORmance!”

She’d put the stress on the wrong syllable, and even after more than 10 years of experience with English learners, it was enough for me to not understand her the first time round.

Stress is really important if you want to speak English clearly, which, of course, you do! And it’s one of those things that most learners don’t usually think about. By the way, most native speakers would have no idea what word stress is, they just naturally know the correct pronunciation patterns which is why they don’t understand what you’re saying when you get it wrong. 

If someone repeats a word back to you and you think “urm, yeah, didn’t I just say that?”, it’s probably a stress mistake.

How do I know which syllable to stress?

Don’t let word stress stress you out. The best thing to do is to be aware of stress when you learn new words. Stress is usually marked by a little apostrofe before the stressed syllable. 

Let’s imagine you’ve just learnt the word awareness. 

Which syllable is stressed? 

It’s the second. So, when you make a note of it wherever you keep your list of new words, you could write it like this /a’wareness/. You’ll see this is dictionaries too. 

Anyway, speaking of awareness, this is actually the best way to learn stress. Once you’re aware of stress and some of the most common patterns, you’ll be able to recognise it more easily. 

So here are some common stress patterns to help you understand the basics and avoid some common errors. I’ll put the stressed syllables in capitals after an apostrophe to make it easier to see the difference.

Two-syllable nouns and adjectives

Most two-syllable nouns (names of things) and adjectives (describing words) sound like this. 

Nouns: apple, brother, basket, office, coffee

Adjectives: happy, sunny, yellow, clever, gentle

Which syllable is stressed?

It’s the first syllable /’APple/ /’OFfice/ /’SUnny/ /’GEntle/.

Wait? The stress can change the meaning?!

Yeah. That’s right. There are a lot of words that become verbs when you change the stress. Check out these sentences and see if you can hear the difference. 

The company keeps a ‘REcord of the employees’ expenses.

The Beatles re’CORDed their last album in 1969.

Always read a ‘CONtract before you sign it.

Metal con’TRACTS when it cools.

This dairy farm proDUCEs organic milk.

Italy exports more PROduce than any other country. 

So what’s the rule? 

Well, the nouns have the stress on the first syllable and the verbs have the stress on the second syllable.

I know, crazy right? That’s English for you!

Second to last 

One last group of words I think it’s useful to mention is words that end in -ic -sion and -tion. 

These words have the stress on the second to last (a.k.a the penultimate) syllable.

GRAphic

LOgic

VIsion

NAtion

These words are often part of longer words and it’s useful to know that same syllable is still stressed:

geo’GRAphic

il’LOgically

tele’VIson

inter’NAtional

You can’t tell me what to do!

I’d love to give you a perfect set of rules but, unfortunately, English is a rebellious language and doesn’t always like to follow them. The rules we’ve just seen will help you to avoid some common mistakes, but remember that there are always exceptions in English .

As I mentioned before, now you know that stress patterns exist, you’ll start to notice them when you learn new words and when you listen to English, and this simple fact will help your English sound more natural and easy to understand.

That’s it for this edition. If you have any questions or topics you'd like me to cover in future newsletters, feel free to reach out.

Grazie mille and see you next time!

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