You Actually Need STRESS! | How To Speak American English

Stress is a critical part of learning how to speak American English. How stress (or don’t stress) words can completely change the meaning of a sentence. In this video we’ll use a real-life conversation to break down the aspects of how to speak American English like a native speaker.

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Video Transcript:

When you’re speaking English, the way you stress words matters a lot. I am often working with my students on word stress. This leads to my students hearing “I’m sorry what?” a lot less.  

Today we’re going to work on word stress with verbs and I’m going to give you a few tweaks that you can use to sound more natural speaking American English and I’ll also show you how you can see your voice like this.  

I’m Rachel and I’ve been teaching the American accent and English here on YouTube for over 15 years. Please visit Rachelsenglish.com/free to get my free course the top three ways to master the American accent, yes we do talk about word stress in that course and you’ll have audio to train with.  

In American English we have two different kinds of syllables: Stressed and unstressed. Stressed syllables, words that can be stressed are usually nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. So today we’re focusing just on verbs, those are almost always going to be stressed. If there’s more than one verb in a sentence they probably won’t all be stressed but I can almost guarantee you in 99% of sentences that you will hear, a verb will be stressed. Let’s head to the computer.  

We’re going to study some real English conversation, I’m with my in-laws here and we’ve just made flan. Let’s start by listening to one phrase and thinking about the stress of the verbs.  

Know everybody let’s just see.  

The verb is see. Let’s just see. And see has an up down shape of stress in the melody of the voice and it has more length, it also has a little bit more volume than an unstressed word like the word before just which was just, just, just see. So the most important thing for you to think about with your verbs is this up down shape of the voice we don’t want it flat, that makes it really hard to understand.  

See. So try that with me now.  

See. Doing it in slow motion you can really feel that up down shape of the voice.  

See. 

Also I want you to hear how much the pitch comes down. It’s not see, It’s see and it keeps heading down especially at the end of a phrase, that’s a very American way to shape the melody, the music of a phrase. We want the syllable to be long enough so we get time for that pitch change, see. We don’t want see, see, see, see. Same sounds, S and E but the pitch is flat and the length isn’t very long. See not as clear as see, see, a little longer up down shape of stress. Now we’re going to analyze it, I’ve used an app called voice analyzer, it did cost me $10 but I use it pretty regularly and I do find it useful to think about how we use the voice and to see smoothness to see pitch, to see volume.  

Know everybody, let’s just see.  

Know everybody, know everybody. First of all, the word everybody so fast. Know everybody. And then we have a little bit more length, let’s just see. Let’s look at what happens to the pitch on that word see.  

On the top you see pitch, and on the bottom you see volume. The pitch, the last word see, look at it down here. The pitch comes all the way down at the end of the phrase. It starts higher, see, ee, ee. But it ends low in pitch. Know everybody let’s just see.  

The line here that shows the volume, you’ll see that know everybody let’s just see. Both of those, all of those words have a little bit of a peak, more volume and then the volume tapers off at the end of the phrase. Just as the pitch falls.  

This shaping of the stress, up down in shape, up down in volume is part of what really makes English clear. So you’re going to want to have that pitch change, a pitch difference on your stress words and verbs are often going to be stressed.  

This reminds me of an analysis I did with a colleague of mine who speaks Chinese. I said the same thing that she said in translation and in American English I had much more pitch change than she did in Chinese. And I’m often working with my students on higher highs and lower lows to have more of a differential when they’re speaking because it’s this difference that really makes stress words clear.  

You’ll see here, we have my voice and where most of my range happens is a little bit lower, the general American pitch is lower than other languages but also I have more contrast between my highest pitch and my lowest pitch and that’s what’s really important.  

Now let’s look at some more sentences. So, think about the verbs and think about what you expect to hear. A little bit more length and a little bit more up down shape.  

See if you can scrape and drizzle maybe. 

Scrape and drizzle maybe. So we actually had three verbs there. See, scrape and drizzle. See if you can, see if you can. So, see wasn’t as stressed as scrape and drizzle which had a lot more of that up down shape of stress, the word and in between those two words, so fast. See, see, see. There was still some pitch change there but scrape and drizzle had a little bit more length. Let’s listen to that one in slow motion.  

See if you can scrape and drizzle maybe. 

Scrape and drizzle maybe. I love slowing down speech this much because you can’t help but hear how each pitch moves smoothly to another one. We don’t have jumps, we don’t have separation this smoothness is a big part of the characteristic of American English. See if you can scrape and drizzle maybe. If you’re wondering why there’s not a solid line for the pitch, it’s because unvoiced sounds don’t get picked up it’s hard to show speech as frequencies like it is here so it’s not a perfect program but it can give us an overview and we see that on both of these lines. We have pitch coming down. That’s really what I want you to focus on with a stressed syllable. So we had scrape a pitch change we had drizzle. Dri, ih, pitch change.  

Scrape and drizzle. I didn’t want to let any of that good caramel go to waste. So, in this sentence I’m going to ask my brother-in-law a question.  

So Jeff your mom has made this for you like hundreds of times right?  

So the main verb there was made. Did you notice there was also has?  

So Jeff your mom has made this for you like hundreds of times right?  

That’s a helping verb and I’m going to do another video on that because word stress with helping verbs is totally different than word stress with main verbs. So the word here is made.  

Let’s listen in slow motion, do we hear a pitch change up and then down?  

So Jeff your mom has made this for you like hundreds of times right?  

Made, made this, made. Yes, it is up and down.  

Guys, if you can find slow motion audio or if you can take a favorite podcast or a YouTube video, take the audio into a program and slow it down.  

I think I used Final Cut Pro here because it was video but you can also slow stuff down in lots of free audio programs.  

I just really encourage my students to do this because the way you hear stress is so different. You start to really feel it. And you also really feel that connection between words, I like to think of it as pulling Taffy. It’s really stretchy, it doesn’t break. So your voice is like Taffy, stretching from one syllable into another.  

Let’s listen to another sentence where the verb is made.  

I’m sure whoever made it was very legit.  

Made it. Made it. Up down shape of stress it was a little bit longer a little bit louder than some of the other syllables.  

My in-laws are very passionate, they’re very loud people. And here my sister-in-law had an opinion that she was saying very loudly close to my head and I said:  

This girl is yelling in my ear.  

Now let’s look at that. Let’s look at our verb.  

This girl is yelling in my ear. 

Is yelling. Yelling. That’s our main verb, it had that up down shape of stress, let’s listen in slow motion.  

This girl is yelling in my ear. 

Yelling in my ear.  

Do you love slow motion audio as much as I do? Doesn’t it really reveal to you the nature of American English?  

Thank you so much for studying with me. Keep your learning going now with this video and don’t forget to subscribe with notifications on, I love being your English teacher. That’s it and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English. 

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