I have to be honest that word stress in English is something of a confusing maze, mainly because of the absence of clear rules or visual clues, such as stress marks, used in other languages to make things much easier! The best approach is often to learn individual elements of word stress in bite size pieces. As you may have noticed, the vast majority of nouns can also easily become verbs in English, however, to differentiate the two we often alter the location of stress within the word. It’s very common for the stress to fall on the first syllable in the noun but on the second in the verb: record is what you played music on before CDs, but record is the process of copying sound or other formats. The same is true for many other noun/verb pairs: present/ present, conflict/ conflict etc.

When people talk informally, and quickly, in any language, they significantly change the way they speak- and English is no exception. In informal English you’ll often see words written the way they are spoken, and it could look a bit surprising. Here’s a survival guide: ‘could’ve’ becomes ‘coulda’, ‘give me’ becomes ‘gimme’, ‘have to’ becomes ‘hafta’ and ‘want to’ becomes ‘wanna’. See the pattern? Unstressed syllables (particularly at the end of words) are expressed as short vowels like ‘a’ because this is how they sound when native speakers pronounce them. You’re very likely to see this in song titles such as Beverly Knight’s Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda (should’ve, would’ve, could’ve) or in the media, for example tabloid headlines or TV shows like the British series Gimme Gimme Gimme.

If you would like private 121 lessons please contact me!