For some English speaking learners who come to China for Chinese language learning, they may think there is no word stress in Chinese language, which is proved to be wrong. There are two reasons to explain why there is also word stress in Mandarin Chinese. The first reason is that the stress sound and unstressed sound are relative. You may have learned that the words with unstressed sound means the words with the stress sound in former part like 谢谢while the unstressed words are those with the stressed sound in the latter part like 再见.

For the second point, those who attend to HSK preparation program in China may be told that the word stress itself is conventional. Some scholars say it is fixed in the certain place of a word because of the tradition. In Chinese language, it has become the custom for Chinese people to pronounce which type of words should be stressed in the former of latter parts. Since such habit is changed, people will feel confused when hearing the words. For example, when 明白is pronounced as mínɡ bái which was originally mínɡ bɑi, people will feel it is unnatural.

After understanding this point, many foreign students may be curious about the differences of the word stress in Chinese language and English language. From the perspective of verbal communication, the so-called word belongs to the spare units which will have some changes when they are really used to the sentence. For English, if the word is put into the sentence, the degree of the stressed sound may have some changes but the place is usually unchanged. If the word is the focus of the sentence, the sentence stress often falls in the syllable of the word stress.

However, in Chinese language, if certain word is used in the sentence and becomes the focus of the sentence, the sentence stress can be put into different syllables according to the needs of expression. For example, if the students who study in online Chinese Lessons answer the question 你参观鸟巢吗as我参观鸟巢, there are several conditions about the places the stress falls. If we stress 我, it means that I will visit the Bird’s Nest. If we stress 参观, we mean to visit but not to do something else.