Stress Rules and Punctuation

1. Las Reglas de Acento (Stress Rules)

The term "stress" refers to the natural emphasis put on the strongest syllable of a word.

EXAMPLE

In English, the word "father" is stressed on the first syllable: fah-thur

In Spanish, there are three simple rules that always apply. Use these rules along with the pronunciation guide above to help you pronounce any Spanish word you encounter:

1. If a word ends in a vowel, an "n," or an "s", the natural stress falls on the next-to-last syllable. Try: ho-la, li-bros, ha-bla, lla-mo, me-di-ci-na
2. Otherwise, the natural stress falls on the last syllable. Try: ciu-dad, co-mer, ha-blar, pa-pel
3. Any exceptions to these rules will carry a written accent where the stress should fall. Try: lá-piz, Jo-sé, a-le-grí-a

2. La Puntuación (Punctuation)

The following are some rules for punctuation in Spanish that are different than what you may be used to in English:

1. Question marks and exclamation points are also written at the front of a sentence/phrase, but they are upside-down. For example: ¡Hola! ¿Cómo está usted?
2. Accent marks are extremely important in Spanish since they tell us how to pronounce a word, and sometimes even tell us what a word means. For example: esta = this, but está = is.
   1. The accent mark/stress mark is always written the same way: ´
   2. Accent marks are written over question words such as "what" and "who": ¿Qué? ¿Quién?
   3. These words only carry the accent mark when they are used to ask questions, never when they are used to give information. For example: ¿Qué dice la madre? (What does the mother say?) Ella dice que tiene una hija. (She says that she a daughter.)
3. When an accent mark is written over a word with only one syllable, it is to distinguish that word from another without an accent mark. For example: el = the, but él = he; si = if, but sí = yes.