Necessito auyuda con accentos porfavor!

Question

Hola todo. Hablo basante bien, pero estoy floja con los accentos. Donde puedo encontrar una lista de palabras que necessitan accentos? y tambien, en verdad los hispanos se usan los accentos? O son flojas como yo? No me gusta hacerlos pero se usan, voy usarlos! bien gracias- cuidate!

Please fill-in your profile information. “Click” on your name in the upper right corner of this page. On the left side of your page, “click” on “Edit My Profile”.Complete the fields. Don’t forget to complete “About Me”. Thanks for doing this. - Moe, OCT 15, 2009

Answer 1

Reglas para los acentos !. If a word ends in a vowel or the letter "n" or"s", the natural stress falls on the next to the last syllable. Example: "Hablo", "caminan", "rosas". 2. If a word ends in any consonant other than "n" or "s", the stress naturally falls on the last syllable. Examples: "altavoz", "televisor", "reloj". 3. If any word is not pronounced in agreement with rules 1 or 2, you write an accent mark over the stressed vowel. Examples: "capitán", "lápiz", "teléfono", "coméis", etc.....Los hispanos usan los acentos? Depende de las circunstancias. Si alguien tiene mucha prisa y escribe una nota a un amigo, pues no pone los acentos. Pero si lees un periódico o escribes algo menos informal, sí, hay que puntuar correcatmente.

There are also diacrital accent marks and one to preserve the stress when pronouns are appended - 0074b507, OCT 15, 2009

(diacritical él, el, ésta,esta, tu, tú) soley to distinguish words; no change in stress - 0074b507, OCT 15, 2009

Answer 2

Accents are widely and consistently written by educated Spanish speakers (from whatever country).

Their misuse or (complete) absence will mark your writing as either semi-literate or very lazy (or both). You will, occasionally, encounter those who insist that they could write the accents (were they so inclined) but (as a matter of principle) choose not to. Without other evidence, it is impossible to tell if they are, simply, lying/mistaken, or are attempting to "reform" the language. In my experience, the statistical evidence suggests that the "liars" are much more numerous than the "reformers".

On the whole, the written accent serves to show that the stress falls on some other syllable than the "default" (there are some cases i.e. que, como, cuando, el, esta, etc. where adding an accent signals a different grammatical function).

Leaving aside the "grammatical anomalies", your problem becomes one of knowing where the stress falls "naturally" so that, when it falls somewhere else you can so indicate by writing an accent mark.

Answer 3

Hola TeQuiero, and welcome to the forum.

Here’s a link to an article in the Reference section on how to use written accents in Spanish.

Answer 4

One of the major advantages that people learning Spanish (native or not) is that there is a close correspondence between the written and spoken languages. One major problem is the distinction (in writing) between the "b" and"v" (which for almost all Spanish speakers are pronounced the same). Another problem is the distinction between c/s/z, which are distinguished by some speakers (In Spain) but not by the majority (Latin America and parts of Spain). In some areas there is also a problem distinguishing between the "y" and the "ll"). On the whole these are minor problems; If you can pronounce it you can write it and (conversely) if you can say it you can write it. By way of contrast, all dictionaries of/for English provide pronunciation and stress information because there are no simple rules for equating spelling/pronunciation or vice versa.

On the whole, learning English grammar is fairly easy (except for our prepositional phrases) but our system of spelling is a total mess.