Understanding stress patterns in English involves recognizing which syllables or words are emphasized in different contexts. Start with word stress by learning the rules and patterns, and practice with words of varying syllable counts. For sentence stress, understand that English speakers tend to stress content words (nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and de-emphasize structure words (auxiliary verbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions). Practice this by reading aloud and intentionally stressing the content words. With time and practice, your natural stress patterns will improve.