let's face it English it's a difficult language so many things that you need to remember particularly as a non-native vocabulary grammar you need to be able to listen to people but in my field of pronunciation things get quite complex even something so simple such as changing the syllable which is stressed in a word it can change the meaning of a word it can make it a completely different word it could change it from a noun to a verb it can even change it from one noun to another noun we pronounce it pretty much the same
but changing the stress can change a lot of things and that's what we're looking at today to help you with both your listening and your own pronunciation on your journey to a British accent let's go [Music] hello everybody it's me Elliot from ETJ English your British pronunciation teacher and today yes we are looking at syllable stress the way that we can change the meaning of a word just by changing which syllable we stress inside of it now this doesn't happen with every word but it happens with a lot of words and it can be quite
confusing for non-natives some of my most advanced students the ones who've been taking my course for a long time they might be really really good with the vowels they might have very convincing British accents but all it takes is just one mistake stressing the wrong syllable changing it from a noun to a verb by accident and it can change the complete meaning of what they're saying and it can cause them to feel a bit bad about themselves so today I'm here to help you with understanding how syllable stress works and how we can hopefully change
this problem so some of you might be asking but Elliot how do I really stress something in everything we say we rely on stress and all it is really is emphasizing a particular section of what you're saying so we have something called sentence stress and we have something called syllable stress today we are focusing on syllable stress so words they are broken into syllables for example the word travel we have trap for two syllables okay which syllable am i stressing when I speak now travel now if you have a good understanding of stress you will
know that I am stressing trap the first syllable why because I'm giving it more emphasis maybe I'll raise the tone just slightly that's what syllable stress is it's raising the tone possibly or just emphasizing a section of our word and as I said this can change the meaning of a word so it doesn't happen with the word travel but it does happen with our first word today which is the word produce produce so this is a noun but if I said use this is a verb let me give you an example in a sentence how
much produce did you produce this week now please note that the sentences I'm going to be reading today they might not make much sense I mainly just putting the two words into one sentence to make you understand the difference so how much produce did you produce this week so we have produce the noun and produce which is the verb so to produce something is to make to create something the verb and the noun is the result of that the produce so you can produce the produce you have let's take a look into the pronunciation the
first word the noun produce we're pronouncing it with the first syllable being stressed FRA we're giving it more emphasis produce right prot is has a it has more of a sound to it more of a stress to it more emphasis and I might even raise the tone slightly if I want to produce so we're pronouncing it with an oo vowel pro-pro to create this sound you have to round your mouth and lift your tongue up and back slightly oh oh Pro produce okay round your mouth produce but with the verb again as I said we're
stressing a different syllable we're stressing produce so because we're stressing a different syllable in this word we're actually going to now relax the o sound that we just talked about produce produce so we're now changing it from pro to pro this sound is what we call a schwa sound you've heard me talk about it a lot in my youtube videos is 35% near enough of what we say in modern RP Pro okay a produce so because we've shifted the stress to the second syllable now we don't necessarily need to pronounce the sound so we're going
to relax it so the schwa is often used as a relaxing sound to help us say it faster so that we can get to the stressed syllable because stress always has priority we say things fast so that we can get to the stressed parts quicker it's the same with sentence stress so produce produce produce produce next we have object and can you guess object so again we have an object so an object is anything really my phone right this is an object but object is a verb and if I object something it means I disagree
with somebody's opinion or I have a different opinion about something I disagree okay I have a different view I object you often hear this in movies in court object object again what's happening here is in the noun form object we're pronouncing it with an O sound but when we shift the stress to the second syllable we're actually going to now relax the O sound and it's going to be replaced with a schwa object object but this doesn't always happen for example let's take a look at the next word insult and insult insult and insult so
here we're stressing the first syllable again on the noun insult and on the verb insult as try it in a sentence he insulted me with his favorite insult he insulted me in Seoul Seoul salted me with his favorite insult so we're stressing different syllables insult insults nothing changes in this word the only thing that changes is the stress on which syllable insult noun insult verb similarly increase and increase increase and increase make sure you're giving emphasis to the syllable you're stressing again this is noun and verb there has been an increase in people increasing their
travel expenses there has been an increase in people increasing their travel expenses increase increase it's really complicated it's confusing it might seem really simple for some of you but I guarantee you that most of you watching right now who are thinking that this is really easy you might still make mistakes with this because when we're talking naturally and we're not really thinking too much that's when the mistakes happen and most mistakes tend to come with syllable stress so make sure you practice it and if you ever hear words which sound similar look to see if
there are different stress patterns different syllables being stressed usually this happens with two syllable words and that's what we've been looking at today but sometimes it will happen in bigger words you just have to be careful now there's a whole section in my course about well everything if you want to achieve a British accent and reduce your accent there's a very good section on syllable stress sense and stress and all the things in between so if you do want to join then of course go to the link below or go to ETJ English comm and
sign up and join the course I'd love to meet you and work with you directly through whatsapp and the videos in the course so thank you very much for watching today I hope you found it useful cheers guys I will see you soon bye [Music]
