Syllable & Word Stress 3 Tips to Sound Clearer - Tarle Speech American English Pronunciation Lesson

Good morning, everyone. It is Jennifer from Tarle Speech. Let's talk about syllable and word stress. So, I'm going to give you three tips for today on how to improve your syllable stress and your word stress. So, when we are talking about stress, this is a very confusing topic for many of my students because stress in English is timed differently than in many other languages. So, English is a stress-timed language, and that means that different syllables and different words are going to have more importance and more weight, and they're going to be stressed more. When we stress something more, it is louder, it is higher in pitch, and the vowel is longer. Okay? So, it's louder, higher, longer. Don't forget, you need to have the opposite, which is unstressed, and that is going to be softer in volume. It is going to be lower in pitch, and it is going to be quicker. Okay? So, we have those opposites. Louder, longer, higher. Lower, softer, shorter. All right. So, three tips for today. Number one, we're going to talk about one big main pattern that you can apply to syllables and two-syllable words and in compound words when they are nouns, and that is going to be stressing syllable number one. And then, we have the opposite, stress syllable number two or word number two when we have verbs and phrasal verbs. We're going practice that. And then, we're going to talk a little bit about thinking about your tempo and changing the rhythm of your words when you add prefixes or suffixes, but when the stress on that root word stays the same. Okay. So, rule number one, let's talk about stress in nouns, adjectives, and compound nouns. Okay. We're talking about two-syllable words here. Okay. And two words put together that make a noun. So, we have this pattern. We're going to stress and then unstress. So, we're going to say record, produce, happy, burger, cookie. So, I'm stressing syllable number one, and I'm unstressing syllable number two. Again, record, produce, happy, burger, cookie. Same pattern for compound nouns. Football, bus stop, North Sea, West Side, haircut. All right. So, think about humming if this is difficult for you, and we're going to really stress the first one. So, it's louder, longer, higher, lower, softer, quicker. Okay. Doing this is really going to make you clearer to many speakers and is going to make sound a lot more natural and native in your pronunciation. So, for many of you out there who are at a really high level, your pronunciation is actually very good in terms of sound. So many of my students say, but help me, I want to sound just a lot more natural. This is a great way to do that is to really focus on the syllable stress and the word stress. Okay. So, let's do a little practice. I'm going to put the words back up. I'm going to say the words, and then I want you to repeat after me. Okay. So, we have record, produce, happy, burger, cookie. Okay. Give those a try. Football, bus stop, North Sea, West Side, haircut. Okay. Awesome. How did you do? I'm sure you all did great out there. All right. Now, we're moving on to tip number two, and this is going to be the opposite of what we just talked about. So, there we stress syllable number one and word number one. Now, we're going to stress syllable number two and word number two. Okay. So, it's going to be Okay. So, it's going to have that stress and that kind of lift up on the end of the word. So, we have the unstressed and then the stress. We're going to use this in verbs, prepositions, phrasal I do like to always remind people that this is the rule and it's a very consistent rule, but there is always an exception to every rule in English. I have yet to find something that proves that incorrect. So, just remember that this is the rule. I would say 99% of the time, there's probably an exception somewhere. So, just keep that in mind. You may hear something different either regionally or in conversational speech, but the rule for the nouns versus the verbs when they're two syllables, that is pretty set in stone. So, keep that in mind. That one is pretty set. Okay. So, let's listen to this pattern. So, we have record, produce, between, accept, and then we have payout, checkout, turnoff, perk up, put in, and then we have bright red, light blue, old-fashioned, record-breaking, quick-witted. All right. So, the two words that might have stuck out to you here are record and record, produce and produce. These words are heteronyms. I have a whole set of lessons on this. And so, you can check all of those out. I have a playlist on that. I'll actually write myself a note and I will add that to the description after class. And we have many words like this that get very confusing because if you pronounce it with the incorrect stress, then you are saying a different meaning to the word. Okay. So, I'm going to give you those heteronyms again. So, if it's a noun, the produce, and then if it's a verb, produce, to produce, the produce, to produce. So, again, syllable number one for the nouns, syllable number two for the verbs. We can think about this pattern for a compound word too. So, we can have the checkout, the checkout. I'm going to the checkout, but I'm going there to checkout. So, slight change in the stress changes the part of speech there. So, the checkout to checkout, the checkout to checkout. So, I have the produce. Where will you produce that? So, you can see just slight difference and that is really going to change the rhythm and it also changes that part of speech and the rhythm. Okay. So, let's just practice a few of those. I'm going to say a few. So, let's do record and produce. Okay. And then let's try, let's go to the checkout counter to checkout, checkout. You can also check out the description in under the video to get more information. And I'm wearing a light brown color on my jacket, light brown. So, again, we're stressing that second word, that second syllable, and that is really helping your rhythm. Okay. So, again, just to recap nouns, we're stressing that beginning and verbs were more stressing the ending. Okay. Moving on to our last tip. Let's think about tempo. Okay. So, most of the time when we add a prefix or a suffix to a word, so the prefix is what we're going to add at the beginning, like un. And then the suffix is what we add at the end, like the ed or an ing or an ly. Most of the time when we add those two words, the root word stress doesn't change. It just stays the same. Okay. So, like for instance, we have the word happy. We're always going to stress that syllable. Right? These will sound a little bit different, though, when you add the prefix or the suffix. That is because the tempo is going to change. The rhythm is going to change because we are going to think about having this amount of time to say a word. So, we have this amount of time. If we have two syllables, we have this amount of time to say two syllables. If we add a third syllable by adding a prefix, we still only have this much time. So, what do we do? It's like a math problem. We have to make all of those syllables a little bit shorter. Okay. Same thing if we add a suffix and now we have four syllables, say, to a word. We still only have this much time. So, we're going to have to make some syllables shorter. All right. I'm not going to get into this today, but this is why we add the schwa sound so much in English because as words get longer, we use that schwa sound a lot more so we can fit everything into that amount of time that we have to say the word. Okay. So, again, we're going to think about changing the tempo. Many of my students will keep the same amount of time for each syllable and they might say happy, unhappy, unhappily. And that sounds almost like a person is kind of like clapping and keeping the same rhythm. In English, though, what we're going to do is we're going to try to fit it into this amount of time. So, we're going to make some shorter syllables. So, instead of saying happy, we're going to say unhappy. You can hear that un and that e are shorter. Now, we're going to add the lee and say unhappily. Happy, unhappy, unhappily. It sounds like I'm speaking a little bit quicker and I have a lot of students who say that it gets to be too fast when someone is speaking, but it's not necessarily that we're speaking at this faster rate. We are just using shorter syllables in that word to speed it up a little bit so we can fit it in that same amount of time. We do this as well when we are saying maybe a place name. So, my example that I love is there's a city and it is called Kent and that is in Ohio. So, when we put that together and it becomes sort of one word as a place, Kent, Ohio, it becomes so much faster, the perception of it, right? So, it's Kent, Ohio, Kent, Ohio. You can kind of hear that rhythm and that tempo changing, okay? All right. So, let's look at some words. I'm just going to say them and I just want you to listen. Happy, unhappy, happily, unhappily. Agree, agreeing, disagree, disagreeing. Heat, preheat, heated, preheated. Okay. Now, repeat after me. Happy, unhappy, happily, unhappily. Agree, agreeing, disagree, disagreeing. Heat, preheat, heated, preheated. Okay. How did you do, everyone? So, don't worry about being perfect. Think about trying a little more to be more consistent and to try to make more differences in your stress and in your rhythm. That is going to make such a huge difference. So, let's try a few of these again. We're going to kind of recap here and then I'm going to take some questions. So, three big tips for today. Number one, we tend to stress the beginning syllable or the beginning word of nouns. Rule two, tip two, we tend to stress the end syllable two of verbs and phrasal verbs and some other things. I'm trying to give you the big picture here. And then number three, tempo changes with stress. That rhythm is going to change. And we see this a lot, of course, with those compound nouns and phrasal verbs and those two-syllable words. We hear that tempo change. But also, we hear this tempo change when we make words longer, when they have more syllables in them, then we need to shrink all of the beats so that they fit into the set amount of time that we have to say the word. Okay. So, let's try an example here. So, let's do the produce to produce, the record to record. Okay. And then let's try happy, unhappily. Okay, everybody. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You are all so amazing. I'll be back next week with another class celebrating my 20th year in business. So, thanks again, everyone, for being here. Have an amazing day.