Acentuation - Stress
 

A very concise and lucid explanation of where to apply written accents:-

Stress
Stress falls on the last syllable of a word, e.g. comer,
unless the word ends in a vowel, n or s, in which case
the stress falls on the next-to-last syllable, e.g. andaba, comes.
All exceptions to this rule have an accent (´) on the
vowel to be stressed: lápiz, condición, magnífico.

I have literally copied and printed it out and pasted it into many of my text books and dictionaries. I find it most useful, I hope it will be equally helpful to some of you too.

STAY WELL!
S.P.

Thanks for sharing this. I also try to boil down information to a clear, concise statement to make it easier to understand and remember. For a really long time now, I have explained it in an almost identical fashion:

Note that with this, you *do* have to know how the word is properly pronounced. For example, "carácter" and "caracteres" might throw some people for a loop.

If you talk to native speakers, there is a whole intricate explanation involving palabras agudas, graves, llanas, esdrújulas, y sobreesdrújulas, etc. It's quite interesting, but for me it's harder to grasp.

Re-reading that slightly baffled me, surely there is no ambiguity there; it's "Carácteres" i.e. the same isn't it?

Singluar: "carácter" spoken stress on the second "a".
Plural: "caracteres", spoken stress on the first "e".

Since the plural ends in "s" and the spoken stress is on the second to the last syllable, there's no accent mark.

Although the stressed syllable is different in the plural, very few seem to know why. It's simply because this is an exception to the rule. There are only a handful of these.

English has all kinds of exceptions to the rules, so I wouldn't cry foul just yet.