Heteronyms are words that keep the same spelling but change their sound and their meaning depending on stress. Record and record. Present and present. English speakers rely on this shift constantly, and it carries real information: move the stress and you change the part of speech, sometimes the entire meaning of the sentence.

This matters for accent reduction because word stress is one of the biggest signals of a natural sounding accent. Placing stress on the wrong syllable does more to mark you as a nonnative speaker than almost any single consonant sound, and it can genuinely confuse a listener when the word itself changes meaning. Native listeners process speech in real time by leaning on stress patterns, so a shifted stress forces them to work harder to understand you, even when every sound is technically correct.

Working through this list trains your ear and your mouth together. You hear the contrast, then produce it yourself in a full sentence, the same way you would use these words in a real conversation or at work.