How do I know where the stress is for a word in Spanish?

4 Comments

1. I ♥ my fam! says:

   May 20, 2010 at 10:45 am

   You can usually just tell where the stress is by saying the word to yourself. If you’ve been studying Spanish for a while it just comes to you.
2. Wicked Witch of the Midwest says:

   May 20, 2010 at 10:45 am

   well those are the ones that you just mentioned. 2nd to last syllable except if it ends in a consonant that is not N or S, or if the stress is marked with an accent.
3. Amelia says:

   May 20, 2010 at 10:45 am

   You’ve got it. A word that ends in a vowel, n, or s has stress on the penultimate syllable (the second-to-last). For example "corre." The stress falls on co-.

   A word that ends in any other letter has the stress on the final syllable. For example, "hablar." The stress falls on the -ar. Or "final"; stress on -al.

   The exceptions to this are words with accents on them. For example, "Dímelo." Without the accent, you know that it ends in a vowel, so it would be diMElo. But you’ve changed that to keep the original pronunciation of the root word ("di"). Adverbs also mess around a bit with stress, usually having a primary and secondary stress. Take, for example, "hermosamente" (beautifully). Because it ends in a vowel, the primary stress is on "-men-"; however, it also have a secondary (less important and less pronounced) stress based on the root word (‘hermosa"). I will mark stress with accents to show you: Hermósaménte.

   I hope that helps!! You can email me if you still want to talk about it. ¡Buena suerte!
4. Spanish in Atlanta says:

   May 20, 2010 at 10:45 am

   If I am understanding your questions correctly, you are asking how can you, yourself know if you are pronouncing it right.

   Since you know the rules! let’s take the word "cama" if you want to say it right you hold the "CA" part of the word for 2 seconds and the "ma" part for one second- like music. The syllable that gets the beat will be longer in duration than the other syllables