ACCENT MARKS!
(They aren’t by accident, you know!)

The most important thing about accent marks is that they serve a higher purpose than to just make you confused and result in lost points on your tests and compositions.

Accent marks help the reader know WHERE to STRESS a word.

There are some relatively simple rules for knowing where words need to be stressed.

When a word is pronounced with the stress on a syllable (which is always a vowel) where it “should” fall (see the rules below), NO PROBLEM! There is no need for an accent mark to be written in. This covers MOST of the words in Spanish. (If PRONOUNCED = RULE . . . NO PROBLEM!)

If the stress doesn’t fall naturally where it “should”, the writer puts in a written accent mark to help the reader know how to pronounce the word. You see, it’s actually to HELP, not to make things harder! (For example, if you have never seen these ENGLISH words before, are you sure you know how to pronounce them correctly? awry, antithesis, magnanimous, behemoth, detritus, imprimatur. Which syllable gets the “stress”?)

After looking these rules over try to apply them to Spanish words you know, and you will find that they really DO make sense!

Rule ONE:

Most words in Spanish DON’T HAVE accent marks!

This is because most words in Spanish follow RULES TWO AND THREE:

Rule TWO:

If a word ends in a VOWEL, an N, or an S:

The stress on the word falls naturally on the
penultimate (S.A.T. WORD: “second-to-the-last”) syllable.

Let’s try this out (The stressed syllable is in RED):

tengo, bailamos, suelo, Elena, enorme, carros, ponen . . .

Since the stress falls naturally on those syllables,

AND THAT’S THE WAY THEY ARE PRONOUNCED,
there is no need to write in an accent mark.

Rule THREE:

If a word ends in ANY OTHER CONSONANT:
The stress naturally falls on the LAST syllable. (pared, doblar, vivir)

ANY WORD THAT IS PRONOUNCED IN A WAY
THAT VIOLATES THE ABOVE RULES
MUST HAVE AN ACCENT MARK TO HELP THE READER!

Examples: pájaro (ends in a vowel, so it “should” be stressed: pajaro BUT: It’s actually pronounced: pajaro
SOOO . . . . We write in the accent mark where we want the word to be stressed so that you pronounce it correctly: pájaro

Other examples: exámenes, fácil, difícil, José, trabajó
(The underlined letter is where the stress “should” be.
The red is where you actually pronounce the stress)

In each of these words the stress SHOULD FALL on a different syllable than it actually does. The accent marks keeps us from having to memorize pronunciations, and alows us to pronounce new words correctly from the very first time we see them.

COMMANDS:

Most affirmative commands will need an accent mark if a pronoun or two are added to the end of the positive command (This isn’t an issue with negative commands since pronouns aren’t added to the end).

Because the command itself is the most important part of the message, and because adding additional syllables (the pronouns) to the end would shift the stress further to the “right” (or the end of the word: see rules above), you have to write in the accent mark on the syllable where you originally stressed the command before you added the pronoun.

Examples:

compra (where’s the stress? On the “o”! = compra)
compra + lo = compralo (NOW, according to the rules above, where’s the stress supposed to be?) It has to be “moved” over to the “a” (word ends in a vowel, count one syllable back from the end), but we want to keep it on the “o”.
So we write in the accent mark where we want to keep it = cómpralo