Use These Spelling Tricks From the 2017 National Spelling Champion
“The important thing to know about spelling is that it’s not just rote memorization,” says Ananya Vinay, champion of the 2017 Scripps National Spelling Contest, which will inaugurate the bee next week this year. Vinay uses flashcards to learn certain words, but she says the real trick is to find out where the different words come from.
English spelling is mostly ambiguous because it borrows words from many other languages. Each of these languages has stronger spelling rules. So, to write a word, you want to know its origin. (In the case of the bee, participants can query the origin of a word, as well as its definition, part of speech, and use in a sentence.)
In most cases, this is Latin or Greek origin. “These two languages make up 60% of English,” Vinay says. When you know that a word is Latin, you should pay attention to the doubled consonants at the beginning of the word. Italian, the modern language closest to Latin, also uses double letters; Vinay loves the word cappuccino .
There are amazing silent letters in French , such as the t in the snail or the z in assoilzie , a word meaning “forgive or justify,” which went from French to Scottish to English, but still sounds like a French word: “ ahh -a-a “. “
The German language has its quirks: the sh sound in the German word can be written as sch , and German is behind the infuriating English rules “I before E”: in German, ie and ei always mean two different sounds. One useful mnemonic (which we haven’t heard from 13-year-old Vinaya) is that wein rhymes with wine and bier rhymes like beer .
Fortunately, English words of Asian origin, like Spanish words, are phonetic. Some anglicized vowel sounds may confuse you, but you are unlikely to come across quiet letters.
Vinay uses the Quizlet learning app (whose rep introduced us to Vinay) to view her cards. She has published two educational kits for beginners and advanced spelling specialists on the site. (Previous Scripps champions cannot compete again, so Vinay is now coaching her school’s team.) She likes to sort her words into lists with specific linguistic origins. The app tracks her mistakes so she can go back to problem words. “I could write 600 words in an hour if I wanted to,” she tells us.
Why teach spelling when your computer can do it for you with red dotted lines? Because learning words and languages means learning history and mythology: Vinay excitedly tells Lifehacker about Latin words like “narcissus”, named after the tragic son of a nymph and river god who fell in love with his reflection and drowned.
Vinay says her spelling has helped her in other studies and academic competitions, such as debates and history lessons. In the Chalice of Science, she can identify the names of minerals, chemicals or species by recognizing root words. She can see the connections between concepts and how those concepts are spread and developed. Spelling is not a trifle – it is a record of human history.