Jatre – Learn Spellings

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We asked “How do you learn spellings?”

Many responded, “By how the word sounds; Breaking down the word / sound; By saying it; By memorizing it, repeating it; By reading, revising and so on.

But English is a phunny language, often the way we speek is not how we rite! In the world of words, tok and wok differently from how we see them.

So many spellings are not how we speak them.

But ALL the spellings in English are how we see them (written).

Hence, it would make sense to learn spellings by SEEing them and not by how words sound. (This is only true for English and many indian languages, based on Sanskrit are written in their phonic way – like Hindi or Kannada etc)

So its important for us to to learn to see.

Many of us SEE LESS because of

  1. We are not trained to see more, we have not done any practice (in fact we are trained to remember more).
  2. Also we are scared of going wrong – so we do not push our eyes, rather take baby steps.

Two ways of learning spellings – one is by learning the spellings and another way is by reading.

The later is simple – just read more – and more you read , more our eyes will see each word and over time it would have seen each word so many times that it would just remember how each word looks (just how we remember faces of our friends since we meet them on a frequent basis. So when you party with words by reading them in a book, you make friends with them

If you want to however invest time in learning spellings – learn them by seeing them. For any new word:

First look for familiar patterns (eg: when learning the word “abjugation” – we would already know how ‘tion’ looks – from words like nation, solution etc). Now all the yes need to focus on is what we have not seen before, what is new!

Second – and this is most important step – is to see the WHOLE word – the way it is written, then visualise it written either in air or on wall or roof of the room in which you are or close your yes and visualise it. Check again with written form that how you have visualised is SAME as how it is written. Repeat this process many times – see, visualize, check.

If you like add two more steps of (1) write >> (2) see >> (3) visualize >> (4) again write from visual memory >> check the image of what you have written is same as how it is actually written.

Some suggestions:

  • When you are writing – every time you misspell (say the spell check shows that or somebody points it out or if you are in doubt) check how visually what you have written is different from how it actually written.
  • Every time somebody asks you a spelling him – do not tell it – rather write it down – check it visually and then give it to the other person to see the spelling. Similarly when asking for spelling – ask people to write it out for you.
  • Read, Read, Read and Read more.

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