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Russian tonic accent and its place

  Tags: Accent | Russian
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11 messages over 2 pages: 1 2  Next >>
Arnaud25
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 Message 1 of 11
14 June 2015 at 7:57am | IP Logged 
Little question for those who learn or have learned russian:
Can you accentuate correctly each and every word that you know ?

Personaly, I can't.
I probably know about 8000-10000 words in russian and know how to pronounce them for having heard them all in different contexts and declinations, but if you ask me where is the tonic accent for these words, I simply can't say (excepted perhaps when the accent is on the letter O, and the O is pronounced clearly like in молокO or плOщадь, or when the accent moves back and forth like стOл/на столE)

Subsidiary question: Do native russians know where is the accent of all the words they know, or is it all intuitive for them (they can pronounce correctly but don't know exactly where the accent is)

And now, let's play: ударение.инфо

Edited by Arnaud25 on 14 June 2015 at 9:37am

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tarvos
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 Message 2 of 11
14 June 2015 at 9:52am | IP Logged 
I most certainly can't. It's basically my biggest issue (along with some advanced
lexicon). However I *can* tell where the stress is when Russians say it.
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vonPeterhof
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 Message 3 of 11
14 June 2015 at 10:23am | IP Logged 
Arnaud25 wrote:
Subsidiary question: Do native russians know where is the accent of all the words they know, or is it all intuitive for them (they can pronounce correctly but don't know exactly where the accent is)[/URL]
Not sure if there's a real dichotomy here, but what you put in brackets certainly isn't true. A native speaker of Russian who knows about the concept of word stress (and they do tell us about it at school) will be able to identify it in all familiar words. In many cases a native speaker's idea of correct stress will deviate from the prescribed standard (звонит vs звонит, торты vs торты, жалюзи vs жалюзи, etc.), but in these cases the "incorrect" stress is usually acquired by picking it up from other native speakers, deriving stress shifts based on one's own grammatical intuition or initially learning the word in its written form without a pronunciation guide (in these cases native speakers often say the word with the stress that seems the most intuitive), not by misidentifying the stress when hearing the "correctly" pronounced word for the first time.

Edit: incidentally that game you linked to is exactly about the kind of cases I mentioned - I got 3 out of 10 wrong in the first round (передал, исчерпать and обнял) not because I pronounce those words "correctly" without being able to tell where the stress is, but precisely because I pronounce those words "incorrectly" as far as the prescribed standard is concerned.

Edited by vonPeterhof on 14 June 2015 at 10:49am

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Dragon27
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 Message 4 of 11
15 June 2015 at 8:10am | IP Logged 
My relatives used to make fun of me because of that issue when I was a child. Now that I'm a grownup they don't do that anymore but not because I put the stress absolutely correctly in each and every word.


Arnaud25 wrote:

And now, let's play: ударение.инфо

Only 6 out of 10 are correct. At both attempts.
*crying*

Edited by Dragon27 on 15 June 2015 at 8:17am

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Via Diva
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 Message 5 of 11
15 June 2015 at 8:25am | IP Logged 
grade 1 - 8/10
grade 5 - 8/15
grade 10 - 11/20

Funny game, what can I say. At least it's more than a half each time.

Usually we know where accents are, this is a sort of information you assimilate since you start speaking. However, this is hard with a word you've never heard. You could also hear a word accented wrong but end up thinking it should be
pronounced that way. My mother doesn't have a degree but she often corrects my accent placement - I guess this is one of my biggest mistakes in spoken Russian, others don't appear often.
The funniest moment when it can actually be bad is when you have to sit through an oral exam and suddenly you don't remember where should that really important word be stressed because you've missed too many lectures (or your hearing isn't
good enough) and haven't really heard the word being actually pronounced.
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Teango
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 Message 6 of 11
15 June 2015 at 8:59am | IP Logged 
I got 8 out of 10 on my first attempt for level 1, but maybe I just got lucky. I've been trying to formulate some rules for stress placement for years, but every time I think I've found the key, half a dozen new Russian words slap a fish in my face and dance all over my rules! I find that, as a very general guideline, stresses do not normally fall on suffixes in singular nominative nouns, and tend to fall on the most familiar root or segment within the remaining body of the word. The stress also tends to shy away from prefixes unless they give more meaning to the overall word than the root, and highly polysyllabic words pivot stress nearer the center. Then there are rules for words ending in +ение etc., and placing the stress before the last н in the latter part of a word. However, there are plenty of exceptions to these tenuous rules, and in the end, the best guideline is just knowing where the word or a similar sounding word places the stress from experience. I'd be delighted to hear any other good guidelines that could help relieve the stresses of dealing with Russian stresses...


Edited by Teango on 15 June 2015 at 9:35am

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Dragon27
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 Message 7 of 11
15 June 2015 at 9:36am | IP Logged 
This time around:
grade 1 - 8/10
grade 5 - 10/15
grade 10 - 9/20

I will NEVER pronounce "афинянин" as "афИнянин" (instead of "афинЯнин"). It just sounds... wrong. It is one of those cases (like masculine "кофе") where natural "inherent" language tendency contravenes fixed standard rules (or, more accurately, standardized exceptions).

An interesting lecture (in Russian) on Russian stress by a well-known Russian linguist A. A. Zaliznyak
http://elementy.ru/lib/432371

It elucidates the reasons why the Russian stress is so inconsistent. The old stress system (where each morpheme belonged to one of three accentual categories, and the stress was governed by them) is gradually replaced by the new one. Some words still have stress according to the old system, some yielded completely to the new rules, and some are in between (not decided which stress they should have yet). And cases, where all the words in the same category have changed their stress, but one or two exceptions were fixed by dictionaries, are very common.

Edited by Dragon27 on 15 June 2015 at 1:16pm

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Arnaud25
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129 posts - 235 votes 
Speaks: French*, English
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 8 of 11
15 June 2015 at 9:53am | IP Logged 
Thank you all, it's very interesting to read your answers :)


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