The general rule in English, which native speakers adopt subconsciously, is that for words of three or more syllables, the stress is on the third from the last. So FINally and finALity are consistent.
It’s that tense marked by the -ing ending.
He walks - simple present
He is walking - present continuous/progressive
He walked - simple past
He was walking - past continuous/progressive
Same idea with future. Can also be combined with perfect (he has been walking = present perfect continuous/progressive.)
And that totals twelve “tenses” in English: past, present, or future combined with simple, perfect, continuous/progressive or perfect continuous/progressive)
“Tenses” is in quotes/inverted commas because linguistically, tense can be defined a bit more narrowly (in which English has two), but in the way most people refer to it, it’s twelve for English. (Though I have seen people count it differently, like 24 for active and passive voice versions of all 12 of these.) In most instructional material for English learners I’ve seen, it’s twelve.
And notably, it’s fine to use the simple past when you’re talking about the past. “I walked down Main Street” is a perfectly normal response if someone asks you what you did yesterday.
But in the present tense, if someone asks you what you’re doing right now, and you say, “I walk down Main Street,” that sounds strange. In ordinary speech, you would say, “I’m walking down Main Street.”
You might say “I walk down Main Street every day on my way home,” but that’s different than describing what you’re doing at the moment. It’s true that sports commentary generally uses the simple present to describe events (“he swings and he misses”), but that’s a very specialized usage.
“I walk down Main Street” sounds like the answer to a question like “What do you do for fun?” or “How do you get home from school” - both questions about habitual behavior.
Yeah, you can use it in narrating, too. Like “It’s 6:30 a.m. John wakes up turns off the alarm clock. He brushes his teeth. He eats his breakfast. What happens next will haunt John for the rest of his life.” But you’re not really using it to describe the actual present of what is happening now.
Thanks for that,I appreciate the effort but I confess it has gone completely over my head.
To be honest – and this fits the title of the thread very well – I was an English major in university and I had no idea either until I worked a spell as an English-as-a-foreign-language teacher for supplemental income while living abroad. You probably intuitively know when to use the tenses:
I went
I was going
I had gone
I had been going
I go
I am going
I have gone
I have been going
I will go
I will be going
I will have gone
I will have been going
Imagine learning that last one as a non-native. It just looks crazy! “As of next week, I will have been working at my company for ten years.”
Another one I learned while teaching and had never been taught is conditionals. There’s the first, second, third, and zeroth, at least in EFL materials. I won’t go over that here.
Then I’ll offer PAS-sion-ate-ly. Accent not moved from PAS-sion-ate and fourth to last syllable with ly.
e-CO-no-my => e-co-NOM-ic Accent moves from 3rd to last to 2nd to last with -ic suffix.
I’ll reiterate my original post -ic suffix tends to pull accent towards end of word. -ly suffix does not.
absolutely, I’ve been teased before for apparantly being ignorant of what some other people consider to be basic technical grammatical terms and concepts. An incredulity that I can claim to do the job I do without be so equipped.
Of course I’m not ignorant of the usage, just ignorant of what they are formally called.
I personally don’t think it is particularly noteworthy at all. Like you yourself suggest, unless called upon to explain it in technical terms to others, merely being able to “do it” by intuition is perfectly fine.
Convincing?
Upsetting?
destroying?
explosive?
destructive?
I’m not sure it is quite such a general rule.
He did say “general rule”.
Don’t forget “mixed”. 
Then there’s the definite article – English has one, as opposed to the three in French, the four in Spanish, or the six in German.
Yeah, I’ve never heard of such a general rule. And for you Brits, oregano. (Americans stress it as o-REG-uh-no; UK is oh-reh-GAH-no.)
(And the tense stuff is noteworthy because that’s what this entire thread is about: stuff that a native English speaker doesn’t have to think about but can be quite daunting for non-English speakers.)
Sure, but those were the first ones that came to mind and they all have second syllable stress.
I’m looking round my room now and things that catch my eye with three syllables
television
embroider
extension
I may be an outlier here but I’m struggling to see it as a general rule.
hell yes, My wife learns German and my eyes glaze over when she starts talking about all the technical stuff. I prefer to pick it up organically and manage OK. I’d hate to try to learn the technicalities of English now, our language is borderline insane.
Every language has it quirks. Hungarian – which I speak poorly even though I lived there for five plus years – can be quite baffling to a speaker like me, even though I have familiarity with Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages and am used to thinking about language in various ways and am not one of those learners who tries to tries to understand a language in reference to his own, but rather understands it as being its own thing with its own rules.
“Subjunctive”. I never heard of it until eleventh grade, in second-year German, but I’d been using it for years. (I never heard of conditionals, either, until I started hanging out on a language forum a few years ago.)
Something I was just thinking about earlier today: when using comparative or superlative adjectives, do you say “more XXX” and “most XXX”, or do you say “XXXer” and “XXXest?” The general rule is that short (one- or two-syllable) words get the “-er”/“-est” treatment, while longer adjectives take the “more”/“most” form. There are hundreds of exceptions, but most native speakers seldom make mistakes.
Example: “It is stupider to choose that treatment, because it is more painful.”
I’ve been saying for years that the English language is the greatest toy ever invented.
I’m not sure that there is such a thing in English; at least, such a thing without so many exceptions as to make it not very useful.
Hungarian, like Finnish, Estonian, and Sami, is a Uralic languages and not Indo-European so that may be one reason.
The other non-Indo-European languages in Eruope are Basque, which isn’t related to any others apparently, and Maltese (related to Arabic though also has Italian related words).