Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
No not completely! Sure you can read the word, but the stress might be different from what you are guessing.
There are a few examples of words which are spell identically, but mean different things depending on where the stress is. Right?

I am taking a break from my Russian studies at the moment.... but when I was doing it, i always looked up words in a dictionary with accents.
There might be some logic to where the accent goes, or some kind of "feel" which native speakers have, even for words they are not familiar with...
but I am not there yet, and I have made mistakes with this several times, including when speaking with Russian speaking people (and that is in addition to all the grammatical mistakes I no doubt make...)
Yes, and sometimes different forms of the same word differ only with stress. The same can be said about the letter ё.
In Russian there are situations when you must use a rule, you cannot learn the spelling. раненый/раненный, не большой/небольшой.