Study GuideSpanish II–Spelling and Pronunciation1. Stress and AccentuationAccent marks in Spanish may look confusing at first, but they actually follow clear and logical rules.Once you understand these rules, accents become much easier to use and recognize.Let’s start with a few basics:•Spanish hasonly one type of accent mark.•A word can haveonly one accent mark.•An accent mark is placedonly on a vowel, never on a consonant.These simple rules already narrow things down a lot.1.1Why Accent Marks ExistThe main reason for using an accent mark is toshow stress. Stress means the syllable in a wordthat is pronounced more strongly than the others.Most Spanish words already have anatural stress, which means they follow predictable patterns.Accent marks are usedonly when a word does not follow these patterns.So before deciding whether a word needs an accent mark, you must first know where the word wouldbe stressed naturally.1.2The Two Natural Stress RulesSpanish words follow justtwo main stress rules:1.If a word ends in any consonant exceptnors, the stress falls on the last syllable.oExample:doctor→ stress ontor2.If a word ends in a vowel,n, ors, the stress falls on the next-to-last syllable.oExample:casa→ stress oncaIf a word follows these rules,no written accent is needed.Preview Mode
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