Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Develop mobile-stress-accent intuition?

 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages Post Reply
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.
1 person has voted this message useful



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.

1 person has voted this message useful



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.
1 person has voted this message useful



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.


1 person has voted this message useful



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.
3 persons have voted this message useful



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


1 person has voted this message useful



If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.3125 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.