do you get what i am trying to say lol?

You can decide how you personally intone (intonate) things, and you shouldn’t follow the rhythm of iambic pentatmeter all the time - Shakespeare definitely doesn’t (”O that this too too solid flesh…”)

The problem is that if you are doing it right, the rhythm is very real. You can’t not hear it even if you don’t know it’s there or you wish it wasn’t. Often I’ll write a line which looks good on paper, but read aloud it sounds terrible. So I’m left working out stresses as I go, and never quite sure what works until later. Some kind of dictionary of stress would just make the process a little simpler….

Daniel

Can’t you “take poetic licence” and change intonation where necessary?

It’s also, by the way, another of the differences between British and American English - a lot of two syllable words have the stress in different places.

That really is confusing for learners of English. To make it a little simple, I always remeber this rule when I forget the right stress: Nouns generally have its stress on the first syllable, and verbs on the second one. There might be some exceptions.

When reading Chinese, I often come across the words which have several readings and tones. Of course, there is no way to tell how to read correctly from its written form. Only books for small children sometimes indicate pinyin under Chinese characters.

In a sense, Japanese is the worst. You can find many kanjis and words with several readings. Japanese words also have accents, but Japanese dictionaries generally do not tell where they are. English and Chinese dictionaries are much kinder to learners.

In this word (Japàn), the second syllable is stressed. Which “a” could turn into a schwa? In this word (Jàpanese), the first syllable is stressed. Which “a” could turn into a schwa?

For the first couple of words, I try to use words they’ve already learned, and then I move on to some words I don’t think they’ve heard before. Once the students are aware of this sort of thing, it helps them mimic new words they hear. Obviously, if they read a new word such as “heretic”, they may guess wrong about which syllable is stressed (as did some of my high school classmates in the states).