Word-Level Stress in Mandarin (Part 1): 4 Types of Words and How to Stress Them!

My last video served as an introduction to Mandarin stress. Today, we are taking a deeper dive by examining how to stress these four types of words, and their subtypes: (1) question words, (2) loan words, (3) idioms, and (4) repeated verbs. I actually covered the first and last of these in the last video, but we will be exploring them more thoroughly.

Soon, part 2 will be out! We will be looking at a few more word types and how to stress them. After that, I will be discussing sentence-level stress and the fifth tone. Make sure you subscribe so that you don't miss these episodes!

Errata:

多少 (how many/much) is a question word that I forgot. When stressed, the word follows the pattern of the first syllable getting stressed and the second remaining unstressed.

When I said "stress everything until that syllable" when discussing foreign names, I mean more specifically "stress everything up to and including that syllable." In the example, 耶 is the last syllable stressed because it corresponds to the stressed syllable in the original Russian word. I am not aware of how often this stress pattern occurs—even among foreign names it seems rare—but the "Dostoevsky" example proves that it can happen.

At the end, I meant to say ''abstract concepts" or "abstract nouns" instead of "abstract verbs."