I've been practicing the American accent for more than a year now, and interestingly enough, I had been studying it for almost a year before I even got to word stress. I uploaded a recording to the JudgeMyAccent subreddit, where they analyze accents, as the name suggests. They pointed out that they couldn’t understand some of the words I said and sent me an Oxford video about word stress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu6UVwkUgzc

I realized that they didn’t understand me because word stress is really important when speaking English—almost as important as pronouncing the words correctly. The good thing is that you kind of learn stress intuitively, so it was only an issue for me when I was reading aloud

Even though YouTube tutorials can be really useful, almost all of them have the following issues:

Lack of authenticity – Most of them feel very artificial and don’t use real-world examples (e.g. from movies).

Too general, lacking details – Many simply say to emphasize or say a word louder when stressing a syllable, but it’s actually much more than that. For example, word stress also changes the phonetics of the word, creating strong and weak sounds (for example ʌ like in bʌs is typically a weak/unstressed syllable sound while ɑ like in  /təˈmɑːr.oʊ/ is typically a strong/stressed syllable sound*). Almost none of these videos talk about this, so I had to figure it out on my own/by myself (?). And who knows what else I haven’t discovered/figured out(?) yet?

Sentence stress videos are even worse. They spend 10–20 minutes telling you to emphasize or say certain words louder, but they don’t explain any additional details. How to do it, how NOT to do it, typical mistakes, making it very theoretical while forgetting to explain the practical part of it, etc.

*Another example is the verb record vs noun record

rɪˈkɔːrd vs ˈrek.ɚd

The sound in the sentences also changes, because of the stress placement. The strong sounds go where the stress is. The sounds are weak everywhere else.