Predicting stress in Russian
As all learners of Russian find out very quickly, stress (ударение) in Russian words is impossible to predict most of the time. There are just a few circumstances under which you can come across a new word in writing and be sure of how to pronounce it.
1. You see the letter ё
This is the most well known and, unfortunately, one of the less useful methods of predicting stress. The letter ё in indeed always stressed…but it’s not always written. It’s fairly common in casual and even literary Russian to write е instead of ё. If you’re reading a text that isn’t specifically for Russian learners, look for common words like своё and ещё to verify whether or not the author is choosing to distinguish between е and ё.
2. You see the letter о written after one of the “five letters” ш, щ, ж, ч, ц
This is also a fairly well-known rule but not commonly applied by learners of Russian. We all know that it is incorrect to write an unstressed letter o after one of these five letters, so when an o is written, it must be stressed. For example: порошок, смешон, лицо ect.
* note this does not apply to loan words. шофёр and шоколад, for example, are exempt from the 5-letter rule
3. You see a masculine singular nominative adjective ending in ой
There are three possible endings for adjectives in the “dictionary” form: ий, ый, and ой. Oй is the stressed ending, and all Russian adjectives with stress on the final syllable must take the ending ой. For example: большой, смешной, дорогой. This also means that if you see a two-syllable adjective that does not end in ой, you can be sure that the stress will be on the first syllable. For example: мокрый, красный, свежий.
4. You see a perfective verb with the prefix вы-
This is a surprising helpful rule: All perfective verbs with the prefix вы- will see stress fall on the prefix. For example: выйти, выпить, вынести. This also applies to the nominalization of these verbs: выход, выпивка, вынос, although this is slightly less helpful because it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a nominalized perfective verb and nominalized imperfective verb (consider the difference between вынос and вынесение).
The imperfective counterparts of these verbs will never see the stress fall on the prefix - if it’s a >2 syllable word (as prefixed imperfective verbs almost always are) you can’t be sure exactly where it will be, but you at least know it’s not on the prefix. i.e. выходить, выпивать, выносить.
5. You already know the imperative of a second-conjugation verb (verbs whose stem ends in a consonant) ends in и/ите
This is an extremely niche circumstance but whatever, anything helps right? The steps to form an imperative for a second-conjugation verb are as follows: drop the ending of the third-person plural and add и/ите, only if the stress falls on the final syllable of the verb in the first-person singular present tense (or future tense for perfective verbs). If the stress does not fall on the final syllable of this form, then you add ь/ьте instead.This means if you know that the imperative form of a verb ends in и/ите, then you also know that the stress must fall on the final syllable of the first-personal singular present/future tense of that same verb.
example: говорить
imperative: говори! говорите!
first person singular present: я говорю
сказать -> скажи! -> я скажу
звонить -> звони! -> я звону
but!!
стать -> стань! -> я стану
верить -> верь! -> я верю
6. The word is a derivative of вешать (to hang)
Obviously I am just grasping at straws now but here we go. For reasons that have never been clearly explained to me, all derivatives of вешать will see their stress fall on the syllable “веш” or the mutated version of this same syllable (i.e. вис). This includes the corresponding perfective verb, the corresponding intransitive verb pair, all the conjugated forms of these four verbs, and all noun derivatives. For example: вешать, я вешаю, вы вешаете, виснуть, я висну, они виснут, вешание, вешалка, повешение and so on. I don’t know why it works but it just does.
Best of luck to all my fellow RSL speakers and let me know if there are any other cool ways to predict stress in Russian!
One more tip I have for RSL is using Russiangram (linked below). They have a chrome extension that will mark where the stress is supposed to fall on words in web pages.
http://russiangram.com
