At school I learned French and one of the first things we learned was how to recognize the three major accents, acute (Greek meaning sharp) goes up diagonally and your voice goes up, at the end of a word a lot, v#but also occasionally at the start or middle instead or as well.
The little hat or upside down V often shows a missing letter. In English we write don't for do not. The French use the little hat sign. The English word hospital in French has a little hat for the missing letter.
Accents are not there to scare you, but to help you. Not to hinder, but to help
The best example is Spanish. Unlike French, Spanish sticks to one accent, the acute accent.
How Accents Help You
In many languages the accent simply says, say this letter e. As in French caffAY. We could use capital letters, or underline. In English we tend to underline a whole word, but put an accent on just one letter. The letter i has a dot.
Accents For Emphasis
When using Duolingo to read Spanish on the small screen of my mobile phone I have a hard time seeing accents. Printers used to put a dot over the letter i, but one printer decided to use a line going upwards over the letter e. This is also used in other languages on letters, other vowels and consonants. It is especially helpful where the word written the same way is pronounced differently with different meanings.
How do you remember which word has the accent? Usually when reading the foreign word, you know which is which from the context. When you are not reading aloud but reading a menu or sign, just reading to yourself, the accent is not so important. But when you are writing a word, which is which?
Spanish El 0he or the?)
In Spanish, I used to confuse the word el meaning the or he. Which el had the accent? Once I started thinking of the accent as being emphatic, showing importance, like a capital letter, it was easy to remember. The is a word used a lot, and has no accent. El, meaning he, has the accent. |I think of the names Faith, Hope, Charity. When they are used generally, they are without the capital letter, faith, hoe, charity. When they refer to a person, you draw attention with the capital letter. The same goes for el in Spanish.
Wikipedia has an article on accents in many languages. You can just skip to the section on the language you are learning or the country you are visiting.
Useful Websites on accents
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic
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