Growing up in Canada, I had to contend with learning two different spellings and pronunciations for words like “schedule”, “colour”, “omelette”, “zed” vs “zee”, “-ise” vs “-ize”, and so on and so forth, so I had to come up with some little tricks to remember how to spell things. Sometimes I’d put on a mental Quebecois or English accent.
Other ones like diarrhea was “Die-err-HEE-uh”, and now that I’m in Australia, it’s most definitely “Die-err-HOE-uh”. 😂
I also recite the ABCs more often than I should. I know a lot of you do, too.
What are some ways that you thought of to help you remember how to spell things? Any language counts.
I’m convinced most people learning English have at some point resolved to pronouncing wed-nes-day and be-a-u-ti-ful in their head just to remember the spelling.
I always think of Bruce Almighty
I just thought of another one… Yogurt and yoghurt. And yes, I definitely do the Wed-nes-day thing, too!
Wed-NES-day
🎮
If you say it rapidly, it is effectively “We’n’sday,” haha.
When trying to remember how to spell Oracle I always have to recite
One
Rich
Asshole
Called
Larry
EllisonYou would think working in IT for over 20 years I would remember how to spell one of the worst databases ever.
I always had the worst time with the mess of vowels in “beautiful”. Then in high school I had a crush on a girl named Bea. Thus was was born “Bea, u beautiful”
The nice thing about my native language is that it’s pretty phonetically consistent with its spelling, so whenever I needed to remember the spelling of a word in english I could just remember how it would sound when said in my native language :3
What’s your native language? English has so many rules and exceptions.
Lithuanian :3
Polymer or phosphate?
There are no rules. Only exceptions.
My language is overly complicated in many aspects, but I do appreciate the simplicity of spelling
If anyone has a good trick for occasion and occurrence, I’m all ears. They’re worse than USB-A ports for me.
When I was a kid, i was taught “Oh U Lonely Duck”, for Would, Could, Should.
It took me way too long to figure out what you meant and how this would be a help. I first thought it must be a song
I still don’t get it?
O-U-L-D
Took me a sec too
Ahhh lol I see now thank you Lemmy user 😍
Necessary
I still don’t have a good trick to get it right on the first try.
I also grew up in Canada, I do my spelling freestyle. Half my apps use my system settings so they use the Canadian dictionary, and the other half seems to default to US spelling
Sometimes I’d look up the spelling on a word, and you’d see the charts that show US, UK, and Canadian spelling for words. Usually the Canadian entry would show both other versions as acceptable.
At the end of the day, as long as you’re understood, it doesn’t really matter
Embrace the red squigglies, follow your heart and don’t let your computer tell you what to do
If you’re a good typist there’s a trick:
Picture a keyboard, then a pair of hands coming up to the home row. Then imagine the hands typing the word.
“Muscle memory” and how humans use written language means we 100% can type a word (spelled correctly) but not consciously remember the exact order of the letters. To our conscious brains, the exact order just isn’t really important. But typing is like riding a bike, if you’re good at you’re not consciously typing every letter.
Like, when riding a bike you think “turn left” and your body pulls off a bunch of complicated movements and sleight adjustments. Think “type antidisestablishmentarianism” and your fingys do the spelling.
What’s really useful with that trick, is using it to remember passwords and other “nonsense” strings. Just imagine yourself typing it over and over until you trick your unconscious mind into memorizing the sequence.
This is legitimately how I think out words, I learned how to spell by typing
Field and shield
EVERYTIME
Sounds like a magazine for Medieval knights
Separate has A Rat in it.
And separate is what a paring knife does
I’ve never heard of either of these memory tricks, but hey, whatever works!
Connect-I-cut
Not something I have trouble with spelling, but a common typo I noticed I make is spelling “check” with a ‘h’ instead of the ‘k’ for some reason.
I’ve found myself working on a tricky civil engineering project in Scotland, and Every Single Time I write ”peat” I type it P-E-A-T-H-backspace.
I can’t believe Australians pronounce “diarrhea” in this way. There is literally no “o!” Are you serious?
As an Australian and sounding it out to myself more than a few times I would say its more die-OH-rhee-ah. But the fuck do I know?
Oh, okay; the original comment put it as “roe,” the penultimate syllable. That was what I found to be bizarre.
Me too which is why I literally sat here saying diarrhoea to myself for 5 minutes straight.
I’ve had a big day so I haven’t had time to respond to all of the comments, but this cracked me up so I have to explain now before sleep, haha. I’m so sorry for laughing. What I meant is just for the spelling of diarrhea vs diarrhoea.
However, I did spend a lot of time in regional Victoria waaaay out west (7 years) and they really did border on saying “diarr-roy-uh”… Or “diarr-ROYEE-uh”. There’s really no way of putting some Aussie pronunciations in to words. Maybe occa. When I first saw “naur”, it was so odd, but it kinda works.
