Hints for learning to hear stress

• Repeat only the vowels of the word, leaving out the consonants: e.g. Manitoba --> [æ o ].

• Start practising with material where the stress is especially clear: nursery rhymes, song lyrics, Shakespearian blank verse.
  
  • a ROSE by ANy OTHer NAME would SMELL as SWEET

• Deliberately try to get the stress wrong and listen to the results:
  • A rose BY aNY oTHER name WOULD smell AS sweet

• Hum words rather than speaking them. The pitch you hum with will tend to correspond to the level of stress: highest pitch=primary stress, medium pitch=secondary stress, lowest pitch=unstressed.

• Speak the words through a kazoo, emphasizing the pitch contours and the loudness differences between the syllables. (Pretend you're the teacher in Charlie Brown TV shows.)

• Exaggerate the intonation contour of a phrase. Give extra strong emphasis to a word and listen for which syllable gets most of the extra loudness and pitch.

  Use the surprised-disbelief intonation contour and listen for which syllable has the lowest pitch.

• Do listen for pitch as a useful cue for stress, but don't automatically assume that the syllable with the highest pitch is also the most strongly stressed. Remember that there are several other reasons why a syllable might have high pitch (e.g., it's the last syllable in a phrase that has rising question intonation or "list" intonation).

• Tap once as you say the word. If you're a native speaker of the language, when you tap will tend to coincide with the primary stress. For the less inhibited, bang on the table instead of tapping.