I wonder how native English speakers do it, but here’s how I approach this problem.
My trick involves using a consistent spelling system for encoding a random letter sequence into a sound which I can memorize. When writing, you just pull those auditory memories, decode the sounds back to the original alphabet salad, and you’re done! Needlessly complicated, but that’s a common theme in English anyway, so it should fit right in.
To make this method work, you need a consistent spelling system, so you could make one up or modify one previously invented for another language. Basically anything more consistent than English should do, so it’s a pretty low bar to clear.
Here are some example words to test this idea with:
- carburetor
- carburettor
- carburetter
Pronounce those letter sequences using that alternate spelling system. It won’t sound like English, but it’s consistent and that’s all we care about at this stage. The end of each word could sound like this:
- [retor]
- [retːor]
- [reter]
In my system, each letter corresponds to a specific sound like e=[e], a=[ɑ] etc. I’ve been thinking of including the Italian c=[tʃ], but you could use other languages too. Feel free to mix and match, as long as you make it consistent.
The idea is that it’s easier to memorize sounds rather than whimsical letter sequences. Once you have those funny sounds in your head, it’s easy to use that same consistent spelling system to convert the sound back to letters.
Once you know that trick, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to spell common words like “island”, “salmon”, “subtle”, or “wednesday. For example “cache” could be stored as [tʃatʃe] in my head. Still haven’t settled on a good way to store the letter c, so I’m open to suggestions.
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You might want to crosspost this to [email protected] , interesting post
Thanks! Just crossposted.
I just throw shit at the wall and hope I get the right spelling tbh x3… it works most of the time once you get a decent proficiency with the english language… when I started I totally used to remember the words as they’d sound with the spelling in my native language hah
It sounds like you’re thinking about the words and playing with them, which is always a good way to learn. I remember being a kid and laughing about g-nats and k-nees. You know, when you say all the letters and really exaggerate. After a while, you just know it.
My go-to is to look at the word for a while, listen to the pronunciation a few times, and try to say it. If I hear the word again, I can usually see it too. I get a transcript in my head when someone says something, or even when I think something. It’s just always there.
If I forget the spelling, the transcript will get blurry or stop. So it’s usually easy to remember the spelling, and if I forget it, I really want to look it up.
I don’t know how common it is, but I’ve definitely seen almost this exact technique being taught to native-speaking English kids in school as a way of helping with spelling.
I suspect some people do this naturally as well: sometimes for me it can be difficult to see “Wednesday” without hearing a little voice saying “wedd-nez-day” in my head. What’s a bit weird is that the idea doesn’t seem to have a common name. Maybe someone else will find it and let us know.
This is one of the examples where I like our crazy words because it shows what these were.
The Sun’s Day
The Moon’s day
Tiw’s Day (a god of war)
Odin’s Day - Wodensdag - Wednesday
Thor’s day, Thursday.
Friday - Frigga’s Day
Saturday we get from the Latin, right? Saturn’s day.
So when I am remembering Wednesday it’s always just Odin’s Day Wodensdag Wednesdag Wednesday, I don’t think about it phonetically since I hear it and see it all the time. But I like the word.
A lot of our really not phonetic words work like that, I’m sure Through used to be pronounced more like Thrugh and now it’s throo we just kept the written word the same.
That’s very interesting. To me, this way is so natural, that I’m not surprised that other people are also using it.
That little voice is super handy. I just can’t remember a million obscure spellings coming from twenty different countries and periods in history. Just memorize the sound like [wɛdɛzdɛi], convert it back to letters, and you’re spelling correctly.
Although, you would still need to remember that [dɛi] is spelled “day”, but you could make that a rule in your system. However, the letter a and y can be pronounced in various other ways too, so you might run into some problems down the line.
I rely on autocorrect tbh. Sorry I can’t be more helpful
I’m a native English speaker who learned to read at the same time I was learning to talk, very young, so wasn’t really sounding things out, more looking at the shapes of the words. There were always words I knew, because in context they made sense, but didn’t know how to pronounce!
Our spelling, while nominally phonetic, is really more historical. So I kind of like it now, it shows where words are from.
The only language I’ve tried to learn is Spanish, and I don’t have to worry about the spelling since it’s pretty phonetic and so close to our pronunciation, and I hear it a lot, so I don’t even think about it, any word I can see I can pronounce (but that doesn’t help much with understanding, only with reciting)
A c in English can be K sound or S, I’m not sure how you would have one marker. There are phonetic systems that bridge languages already. If I am writing something phonetically I default to Spanish letters, because their spelling is so consistent.
And you could also use the Spanish spelling system to remember any sequence of letters. Like “rhetoric” for example. If you pronounce that word using the Spanish system, can you hear the h? If so, you can memorize that sound more easily than the exceptional spelling.
There wouldn’t be any “h” if you thought of it in terms of Spanish sounds.
If you really get into the weeds, the funky spelling can sometimes give you a clue about how the word is pronounced. (But only sometimes.) For example, “rhetoric” can have a bit of an “h” sound, especially in British English. I notice it some in American English too, but it can vary from person to person.
Or “gnats.” The “n” is a tiny bit different than if you said “Nats,” like the baseball team. You obviously don’t say the “g,” but the tongue comes up a little in the back of your mouth, almost like you were going to say a “g.”
That’s nothing to worry about, it’s just something I’ve noticed.
Way back when (before spellcheck I guess) we were forced to fill notebooks with spelling words, written many, many times a la Bart Simpson’s chalkboard punishment in the show intro. I still have phantom hand cramping from spelling homework.
Ouch! That is definitely the hard way to do it. Just memorize every exception one by one.
I don’t know how my native speaking ass remembers it. I think it was smacked into me?
I also use to Google a lot, but now I’m suspicious of that ai bot. Hate him. He’s smarmy.
我总是嘲笑那些觉得英语拼写很难的人。中文加入了聊天。
LOL. Using an unfamiliar character set and adding tones spices things up a lot. No idea about the grammar though? Is it as convoluted as German grammar?
It has no declensions (tenses, aspects, moods, voices, grammatical number), no word forms and a purely-positional grammar.
So, no. It’s not even slightly close to German grammar.
Chinese languages are dirt simple … unless you want to read or write them. 🤣
I admire Chinese, once you learn the basics of grammar and sentence structure it’s often self explanatory due to context
Yeah, it’s a pretty simple language, though you have to be VERY aware of context or you lose the thread rapidly.
I appreciate how information dense it is, though, if you’re paying attention.
Tones are damn hard for me to pronounce though, but I guess it’s something your mouth gets used to after a while, just like how I got used to the Nahuatl ‘tl’ (does not sound like it’s written, more like ‘xghil’)
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You use tones all the time. It’s just that you call it “intonation” and it’s at the semantic level of the language. In the various tonal languages (most of them in the Chinese family) they’re part of the lexis and called “tones”.
The difficulty isn’t in pronouncing them. Trust me, you pronounce the four tones of Mandarin ALL THE TIME when speaking English. The difficulty lies in the fact you’re using them for radically different purposes and this is screwing up the wiring in your head.
Interestingly, spoken English is also pretty simple. As long as you don’t need to read or write, anyone can learn it. I know someone who learned English by ear. Never took any courses, and he’s doing just fine. Sure, it’s a little broken here and there, but he can manage just fine.
However, if he needs to read an unfamiliar word he has never seen or write a word he has only heard once or twice, it’s game over. Finding words in a dictionary just doesn’t work for him, like not even a little bit.
Is this just the international phonetic alphabet but applied to spelling?
It’s kind of the opposite - the IPA gives you an unambiguous written representation for each sound, while OP is making an unambiguous sound for each letter.
So for example, let’s say that you keep misspelling ⟨cache⟩ as ⟨cash⟩. Inside your head you memorise “⟨cache⟩ is spelled like [katʃe]”, then next time you need to write the word you’ll be less likely to write ⟨cash⟩ instead.
The idea is to memorize a funny sound instead of the letter sequence. Decode the sound back to letters and you’re spelling things correctly.
