![]() ![]() Another one, The Beatles song She s gotta ticket to ra a ide ….where is the F, is the A in that ride. At least the Usanians USE the R, Now Add a Silent H it will be hour Something like aue, But AWE is pronounced O. Eg our is an A (not an AI ) in British English. I saw soldier, That reminded me of Lieutenant :Leftenant in British, and Colonel Kernel, Cueue, Hiccoughs and hundreds of British towns and cities, But Frankly English language is Totally Nuts. They were usually able to spell prefixes and suffixes but failed to make the correct adjustments to the spelling of the base word when adding them. Silent letters were a big problem – sometimes they knew there was one but put it in the wrong place. The majority of their errors involved vowels rather than consonants, especially weak vowels, short vowels and vowel digraphs. They’re obviously very different from the ones that native speakers struggle with.īy examining student errors I discovered: It was a small sample but those words certainly do look like some of the ones I most often see misspelled. Note that the majority of them were Arabic speakers, hence the third item. I did some research with adult English languge learners who were weak spellers and these were the words they most often misspelled: Which words do you or your students have most trouble spelling? Parallel Source: poll from OnePoll quoted in Daily Telegraph 06 August 2010 Sadly, technology has not yet produced a spell-checking pen for that handwritten application form.Ģ0. Spell-check/Spellcheck (?) will help, of course, which is why many young people delegate the job entirely to that marvellous (two ‘L’s in British English) programme (one ‘M’ and drop the ‘E’ in the US or amongst techies). Two ‘N’s or one? Does two ‘C’s look right? Unnecessary causes double-trouble here to add to its ‘C’ or ‘S’ issues. ![]() There’s a similar confusion over what creates the ‘CK’ sound in liquefy (18), added to the confusion of an ‘E’ in place of the usual ‘I’.īy far the most difficult hurdle for any speller, however, is the dreaded ‘double letter’ dilemma. The same applies to those other providers of hidden spelling rules: Latin and Greek.Īn understandable uncertainty as to when ‘C’ rather than ‘S’ applies lies behind consensus (6) supersede (12) conscience (19) and unnecessary (7). Until comparatively recently a basic knowledge of French was assumed of every ‘educated’ English reader but most now would recognise the word entrepreneur (16) from business rather than the language from which it originates. In both these cases the spelling pattern is literally foreign French, to be precise. In some cases it is an unexpected combination of letters containing few phonetic clues – bureaucracy (11) and manoeuvre (3) are examples here. This problem is most glaring when (many) young people transcribe ‘could have’ as ‘could of’ or a lot (14) as ‘alot’. ![]() And comparatively few outside the Royal Shakespeare Company clearly enunciate separate (1) – more typically the ‘A’ becomes an ‘E’. What makes some English words difficult to spell? One source of difficulty is inconsistent pronunciation many sound out ‘definately’ when they mean definitely (2). Which words do you think are most commonly misspelt in English? Write down five words you expect to be on the list at the end of this post. ![]()
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