Thread: How to add stress marks to any Russian website

Did you ever wish all Russian books and websites had stress marks in them? That would be nice, wouldn't it? As you probably know, word stress in Russian is very important and can affect the meaning of a word. One of my Russian students once approached me with the question, “What does za-SU-kha mean?” I was puzzled for a moment while my voice recognition subsystem struggled to find a match that was not vulgar or obscene. Then I looked over at the newspaper he was reading. The word he was looking at was simply ZA-sukha (засуха) meaning ‘drought’. Thank God! One misplaced stress and you may sound like you’re swearing!

Luckily, there is a tool that adds stress marks for you to any web page or any piece of Russian text that you can copy and paste. To get a web page stress marked, just copy its URL and stick it into russiangram.com. Hit Enter and you will see the same page with stress marks. Voila! Now you can enjoy your favourite Russian novel or surf the web while learning new words with the correct stress.

Disclaimer: I am the developer and the sole owner of this website and the technology that inserts stress marks. As such, I am interested in improving this website and will appreciate your feedback. Please help me help you learn Russian more effectively. Once again, the website:

russiangram.com

Классненько! Мне очень понравилось.
Спасибо большое!
Ваш сайт будет оставаться бесплатным?

А почему не у всех слов расставляются ударения?

Originally Posted by Lampada

Ваш сайт будет оставаться бесплатным?

I would like to keep this website free and available to everyone regardless of their financial state. I also think it is only fair to get remunerated for any work you have done. As to monetizing this website, I have considered a few options including online advertisements, "premium" features and donations. I personally dislike ads and think they're ineffective for the publisher and annoying and distracting for the viewer. So ads is the last thing I would go for, if nothing else works. Premium features would go agaist the principle of free availability and I don't really see how this may work in my case - you can have Dative for free but you have to pay for Prepositional? I quite like the idea of donations as it seems to be a very democratic way of raising money: if you have a few pounds to spare and you think the website has value, it will only make you feel good to support the person who has put in a lot of effort into it. Works for me

Originally Posted by maxmixiv

А почему не у всех слов расставляются ударения?

This website was started 1.5 months ago and is currenly in active development. New words and word forms are added daily. Proper names (city and person names) I have been collecting over the past few years. If you have a list of words that it fails to stress mark, please send it over and I will be happy to add them to my dictionary.

Hello, I've just looked at your site and it's absolutely brilliant.

I personally would prefer to see the stress not marked in red but with the traditional stress mark (eg Боло́то). Again personally, I would get rid of the English transliteration beneath, but maybe some people would find that useful.

The best feature is the ability to enter a site address and have it displayed with the stress added (this time in the traditional way).

It's a great idea and I hope you make loads of money from it. If you want me to be a "guinea pig" for it, please get in touch!

Hi, I am glad you liked the website. You can get the stress marks exactly they way you want them using the buttons above the text. You can also show and hide the transliterations if you prefer. The website may need a bit more documentation. I just believe that less documentation is better and I tried to make the buttons as obvious as possible.

As to stress-marking entire web pages, I have taken a step further and created a browser extension that allows you to add stress marks to the page you are viewing in one click of a button. To get the extension, follow the link below. It only works in Google Chrome.

RussianGram.com Chrome extension

Currently it's free but the plan is to make it paid-for, once I am happy with the quality of stress-marking. Try it on any Russian web site, eg Википедия.

Thanks for putting yourself forward as a tester for the project. If you happen to find something that's not working, please do let me know. The preferred way of reporting issues is through the issue tracker.

Thanks and have fun with the new extension! I do hope it will make Russian a bit easier and much more fun to learn!