Beyond sentence stress, individual multi-syllable words carry their own fixed stress pattern in English, and moving it can make an otherwise correctly pronounced word hard to recognise. “Comfortable” and “photograph,” “photographer” and “photographic” all shift their stressed syllable depending on the ending — a pattern English speakers absorb without ever being taught it explicitly, which is exactly why it’s invisible until you’re learning it as an adult.
Try this now. Say “record” as a noun (“a criminal record”) and then as a verb (“to record a meeting”), noticing the stress moves from the first syllable to the second. Do the same with “present,” “object” and “permit.” English uses this noun-verb stress shift constantly, and it’s one of the more reliable patterns worth learning as a rule rather than word by word.
For any word you personally trip on, the fix is the same: find the stressed syllable, say it noticeably louder and longer than the others in isolation, then put the word back into a full sentence.
