Pronunciation rule: stressing syllables
Lower to higher level (A1-C1)

English does not have pronunciation rules for everything but there are some rules about syllable stress that can help you.

One of the most useful ‘rules’ is about words that end in ‘tion‘ or ‘sion‘. You should normally give most stress to the syllable before the tion/sion sound and not stress some of the other syllables. In the words below, the main stressed syllable is in bold:

station (2 syllables)
migration (3 syllables)
progression (3 syllables)
preparation (4 syllables)
communication (5 syllables)

This also happens with words ending with ‘ic‘ e.g.:

panic (2)
fantastic (3)
exotic (3)
electronic (4)
economic (4)
unrealistic (5)

The pattern above can be very helpful but it only works if most of the syllables are not stressed. To not stress a syllable you often need to ‘reduce’ the vowel sound to something more neutral like the vowel sound /ə/ which you can find in many English words eg ‘about’ or ‘cinema‘ or reduce it to the sound /ɪ/ as in ‘tin’ or ‘in’. These 2 sounds are made in about 50% of all the syllables in English. Don’t forget that in English, the sound of a word is usually not the same thing as its spelling!