How do we break words between syllables in English?

Don't you sometimes wonder why you have never been taught to break words in your English lessons? Basically it's because the rules are different in English and don't follow a pattern like in Portuguese. In some cases we might break a word between syllables just like we do in Portuguese (but again, syllables don't always follow the same pattern!)

Ex: napkin (nap-kin)

cabin (cab-in)-- you see what I mean? (in this case the first vowel is short, so you should break it after the consonant!)

mistake (mis-take) and not mis-ta-ke as we would probably break in Portuguese.

To make matters worse, we should hyphenate between prefix and root or between root and suffix:

antecedent (ante-cedent)
introduce (intro-duce)
lemonade (lemon-ade)

An -ing may be carried over to the next line:

dancing (danc-ing)

But -al, -ly and -ed endings should not be carried over to the next line:

merged (not: merg-ed)

You can hyphenate self-satisfied, but you can't hyphenate selfless (self-less is wrong).

For the reasons stated above, not many people care to learn the rules; they simply consult a dictionary for syllabication (yeah! That's what it's called!)

Hope it has been useful!
See you soon!
Teresa