Bill_Sage667 Groupie United States Joined 4964 days ago 62 posts - 71 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 1 of 6 29 August 2010 at 3:13pm | IP Logged |
Is it possible to be able to develop an intuition wherein you're able to predict where the stress-accent goes in verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.? I suspect that it might be possible when it comes to verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, not so sure with nouns, though. If it is indeed possible, how long do you have to expose yourself to listening materials? Does it take forever? Or do you have to start learning Russian at a young age to be able to develop this 'intuition'? Because it would be sad if takes years......I don't want to constantly look up a new word (one that I come across when reading a novel) in a dictionary just to see where the stress-accent goes.
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Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6198 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 2 of 6 29 August 2010 at 7:44pm | IP Logged |
Why not listen to Russian audiobooks as you read? Then you'll have the stress correctly placed for you, without needing to look it up.
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Bill_Sage667 Groupie United States Joined 4964 days ago 62 posts - 71 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 3 of 6 05 September 2010 at 2:23pm | IP Logged |
yes, that's a good idea when it comes to long adjectives, but how about those verbs and nouns that have a change in mobile accent between declensions and conjugation? I'm kinda aching to know how many months or years it takes to 'get' the feeling for where the mobile stress accent is placed (since I know that Russians themselves do it of course, they even sometimes put the mobile stress accent in a different places compared to other Russians, but still 'get' it such that the word still sounds 'right'). It's kinda irritating to look in a dictionary whether 'шпик' has a shifting stress accent in the genitive singular, and so on. Same with the verbs, and their past tenses.
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Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6198 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 4 of 6 05 September 2010 at 4:24pm | IP Logged |
Audiobooks should have the mobile in the right place in all instances, not only in long adjectives.
In general, if you're dealing with a phenomenon where your resources can't give much more advice beyond "this exists, and you should look up examples and individual words", listening to a lot of material using the rules correctly is one of the more helpful things you can do.
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5140 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 5 of 6 05 September 2010 at 5:12pm | IP Logged |
If the stress is unpredictable, no amount of intuition will allow to predict where it
should be. When English speakers see a longer word they've never seen, they can't tell
where the stress is supposed to go. When native French speakers see a word they've never
seen, unless is has certain specific endings, they can't guess the gender. If it's
unpredictable, it's unpredictable.
That aside, you can either look up every word, or seek en masse exposure with audiobooks,
as was suggested, or other audio/video resources.
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LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5525 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian
| Message 6 of 6 06 September 2010 at 11:48am | IP Logged |
Despite what teachers and university lecturers will tell you, there are guidelines for stress - I say guidelines because rules, to me, mean that there are no exceptions, and unfortunately, there usually are. There's a book listing these guidelines -
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Handbook-Stress-Russian/dp/1 41020541X/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1283765481&sr=8-10
Personally, I bought this book on the basis that I had absolutely no clue about stress whatsoever - it baffled me and it made me very conscious about even saying individual words, let alone try and put together a sentence - and then, with mobile stress in nouns, God help me if I tried to decline a noun into an oblique case, both in the singular and plural, because stress just seemed to jump around everywhere at random. I read the guidelines in this book - and although it didn't make things crystal clear by any means (but I didn't expect it to; Russian stress is complicated) I had a much better idea about where to place stress after I had finished going through it. After reading the book, the way I looked at stress changed - I no longer saw it as a really annoying concept that just messed my Russian up, I saw it as an interesting challenge - of course I still make mistakes with stress, especially mobile stress in nouns, but now it's much easier and I find that I can predict where to put it to a much greater extent than before.
Jack
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