[jacobolus]

Why do you think students will better learn to spell without spellcheck?

As far as I can tell spending class time on spelling per se and/or grading students on spelling mistakes is a complete waste of time and focus.

The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment.

It’s plausible that showing that a mistake was made but then forcing the student to retype or rewrite the word correctly (without letting them just click once on the word to fix the mistake) would be more effective.

But I have seen no evidence that spellcheck reduces people’s ability to learn spelling. I’d like to see some kind of formal study.

Disclaimer: I think giving every 1st grade student a chromebook is a terrible mistake.

[grawprog]

>The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment.

I'm not sure I agree with this. This doesn't teach the fundamentals and rules of how words are put together. Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put together so, even if you don't know how a word's spelled, you should be able to at least be able to make a good guess based on your knowledge of English. The spell checker doesn't teach you any of this.

[jacobolus]

People don’t learn the “rules of English” through explicit instruction. They learn them through years (decades) of exposure.

Anecdotally, the main predictor of how good someone’s spelling will be is how much reading they have done.

[grawprog]

I did. They taught us this in school. My spelling is good. I rarely rely on a spell checker and have autocorrect turned off on my keyboard because I find it annoying rather than helpful. Knowing how to spell and sound out words helped me be a better reader and kept reading interesting for me.

Anecdotally, I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling is usually atrocious also. I also know a few heavy readers with terrible spelling because they never learned properly. Their pronunciation of large words is usually atrocious.

[jacobolus]

> I've met many people that dislike reading because they find large words complicated to comprehend, their spelling is usually atrocious also. I also know a few heavy readers with terrible spelling because they never learned properly. Their pronunciation of large words is usually atrocious.

None of the people I know who grew up in highly literate families with parents who read with them several hours per week up through age 7+ ever had either of these problems in adulthood. Including the dyslexic ones.

I am highly skeptical that your acquaintances dislike reading because the spelling of long words is too complicated. More realistically they find long words hard because they never did enough reading to become fluent. Nearly everyone can get at least 90% of the way to reading arbitrary English text with about a year of appropriate reading instruction at age 6 plus a few years of regular practice.

As someone who never spent any effort on spelling in school, big words are fine to read and spelling is no trouble. I also dislike and disable autocorrect. I’d happily put my pronunciation of arbitrary English words up against anyone who isn’t a professional linguist.

[vonseel]

Heavy readers with terrible spelling seems odd... spelling isn't something that is hard, it's kind of automatic once you use a language past a certain age, at least for me.

[filoleg]

>Anecdotally, the main predictor of how good someone’s spelling will be is how much reading they have done.

Agreed, but it doesn't just have to be books. My personal example: in my native language, I read tons of books as a child, which was what gave me a strong edge when it comes to spelling/grammar. I got into learning english in my late teens, and, by that time, I wasn't as much into reading long-form books as I was into reading random things on the internet. I would say my grammar/spelling is on about the same level in english as it is in my native language, at the moment. In both cases, however, I can easily attribute it to consuming a lot of reading material that gave me some kind of intuition for the correct spelling/grammar. I don't remember explicit grammar rules for either language. In case of my native one, I never really learned the rules in the first place, as I had trouble memorizing those, and the rules felt forced and arbitrary with tons of exceptions to each of them. I just know that something feels "right" or "wrong", simply because of tons of reading that settled down in my head.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, and I prefer the (good, "adult") Russian translation of the Lord of the Rings to the original too! :P

[filoleg]

Wait, there was something special about the Russian translation of LotR? I totally missed it then, because that's how I read LotR as a kid (translated Russian version), and I have never re-visited the book since then, as I was not a big fan of the movies (which, I know, is almost a sacrilegious thing to admit, given the reactions I've received for saying it irl).

[BlueTemplar]

Haha, I knew it ! Let me guess, you read the "big single dark brown book" version too ? It might be just the children nostalgia though... (Had the same reaction to the movies initially !) I've also seen much later a translation that seemed to be designed "for kids" and that seemed godawful to me !

[shard]

In related news, the younger generation of kids in Asian countries are getting worse and worse at writing Chinese characters because they can just type the Romanized versions without learning how to write it. Personally I am able to read Chinese at a moderately high level (can read newspapers) but I cannot write most characters off the top of my head. This is what happens when you emphasize reading over physical writing with pen and paper.

[seanmcdirmid]

Is that a bad thing? You can still write in Chinese with an IME, and most uses are on some sort of phone or computer anyways. 27 year old me learned how to text in Chinese but skipped learning the muscle memory to write characters, first I'm left handed so stroke order was bizarrely awkward anyways, but also...it just didn't feel important anymore.

[kochikame]

If you live in a Chinese-speaking country then, yes, it's a bad thing.

There are plenty of situations in which you still have to write; at the post office, applying for things, hospitals, places like that. Maybe not every day, I'll grant you that, but you are going to hit barriers when required to write your address or apply for a driving license or similar.

You don't want to be the guy painstakingly copying characters stroke by stroke off his phone while a line grows behind you.

I live in Japan and often regret that my writing is so far behind my reading comprehension. Like, it doesn't need to be AS good, but it would be better if it were close.

[seanmcdirmid]

I lived in Beijing for 9 years and it didn't seem to be a problem. Yes, I occasionally had to really write something in Chinese (e.g. at the bank when making an account changed), but my hand was basically held while writing it. The post office and hospital never required me to write in Chinese.

[mrr54]

Of course it's a bad thing! Imagine not being able to write your own language.

[raverbashing]

I think some countries should just bite the bullet and start replacing their archaic writing systems with something more modern

Phonetical alphabet, standardized spelling, etc

Few people nowadays have the time and willingness to learn thousand of characters and their stroke orders. Not to mention the whole "every character has several unrelated pronunciations, but hey, context, right?!" of Japanese.

[knolax]

> archaic writing systems with something more modern

The Latin alphabet is an archaic system that barely worked for Latin and doesn't work at all for English. There's a reason English dictionaries have to include IPA.

> Phonetical alphabet

You say so while typing in an alphabet that doesn't have enough characters to describe all the phonemes of the language you're using, and which is used phonetically in name only.

> standardized spelling, etc

I don't know what gives you the impression that "some countries" don't have standardized spelling.

> Few people nowadays have the time and willingness to learn thousand of characters and their stroke orders.

You're literally talking about the writing system of the word's most widely used language. Obviously a plurality of people do have the patience to do so. In practice it requires roughly the same amount of memorization as English. The only difference is being that most of HN probably learned English early in life and have internalized things like "Peak Vs. Pique Vs. Peek".

[vonseel]

Honestly it took me a few seconds to remember what pique even means.

[pcdandy]

Chinese characters (hanzi) are not an 'archaic writing system'. While hanzi allows for the expression of meaning in addition to pronunciation, which is unique amongst the other writing systems of the world, they are also more phonetic than is commonly perceived.

The majority of Chinese characters (more than 80%) are 'phono-semantic compounds' where 1 part of the character indicates the meaning and the other indicates the pronunciation. And the majority of these compounds follow a surprisingly regular pattern: for instance, the character '召' is pronounced 'zhao' in Mandarin Chinese, and forms the right side of the characters '招' and '昭' - both of which are also pronounced 'zhao'.

Here's another example - the character '包' is pronounced 'bao', and is frequently found as a component in characters pronounced 'bao': '饱' ('full stomach', with the food radical ⻠ on the left) and '抱' ('hug', with the hand radical ⺘). '包' also forms the phonetic component of some characters pronounced as 'pao', which sounds similar to 'bao': '跑' ('run', with the foot radical ⻊), '炮' ('cannon', with the fire radical 火), and '泡' ('bubble', with the water radical ⺡). I had been studying Chinese recently, and understanding the phonetic aspects of the characters has helped me to read them more easily than before.

Having said that, a lot of these phonetic relations date back many years and some of them have been obscured due to language change. But to blindly assume that Chinese characters are 'archaic' is false - as others have commented, you can say the same for English spelling, which also has spellings that date back many years but do not make sense today, like the 'gh' in 'tough', 'dough' and 'caught'. Also, it would be possible to reform Chinese characters such that every character with the same pronunciation would use the same phonetic component, while allowing for additional components to indicate the meaning. And that was what Simplified Chinese did to a certain extent.

[raverbashing]

Thanks for the detailed response, 'archaic' is not necessarily the best word to describe the problems with it, and hanzi seems to be more straightforward than Kanji

But dealing with a huge alphabet is more complicated than one with (much) fewer characters as the Latin, Arabic and Korean ones.

The English spelling problem is annoying, but most languages don't have such a disparity in writing (which, for the most part, is not that big).

[tasogare]

Chinese writing is adapted to write the Chinese language. The only place where this is an issue is languages where there was no standardization (namely every other Chinese languages except Standard mandarin) because even natives don't know which character to use. More interestingly, once someone has knowledge of Chinese character, he can guess the meaning of text in other languages; for instance Korean written in mixed script is incredibly readable to some one with Japanese reading ability.

The Voyager Golden Record has a record of Minnan language which transcription in Chinese character is: 太空朋友，恁好。恁食飽未？有閒著來阮遮坐哦! Anyone in this thread reading some Chinese can guess accurately what the first sentence means. Probably the second too. The third is more difficult but looks like an invitation. Now compare with the romanization: Thài-khong pêng-iú, lín-hó. Lín chia̍h-pá--bē? Ū-êng, to̍h lâi gún chia chē--ô·! Besides pêng-iú looking like Mandarin pengyou is this totally foreign.

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

They did, but it stopped and then went back as far as I know. E.g. nowadays there are two Chinese writing systems, simplified and traditional. Similar Japanese efforts to ban some rare kanji (e.g. some were only ever used in certain last names) fizzled with the advent of computers that make it easy to type any kanji.

People do not always want things simplified. They also want richness and this may conflict with simplicity. Look at fonts, for example. They gained a lot of complexity recently, there's lots of contextual variations and even two different systems to express it (Apple has its own). The monospace fonts that were invented for typewriters are much simpler than other fonts, but nowadays they are only used in certain specific contexts, like programming, and even there they started to get quite a bit of richness + complexity with PragmataPro being the absolute champion of it.

I'd say the general trend is toward perceived simplicity, but internal richness. Automation, not simplification.

[raverbashing]

> look at fonts, for example. They gained a lot of complexity recently, there's lots of contextual variations and even two different systems to express it

Yes, but see how many fonts there are for Latin alphabets vs. Kanji/Chinese. (something about dozens of characters vs thousands)

[shard]

What you describe includes English, however, due to its heritage of being a conglomerate of several different languages. That's why English spellings bees are a thing -- the spelling and pronunciations don't always match up. We'd need to switch to something like Korean, where deviations between spelling and pronunciation can be counted on one, maybe two hands.

[raverbashing]

> What you describe includes English

Yes, but to a much, much lesser degree

If someone says to you their name is "John" you know how to write it. Foreign names might be weird sometimes (hi Ireland) but usually they're simple.

In Japan you have to ask everyone how to write their name because there's no standard way of spelling. And every character has (completely) different pronunciations depending on context https://www.thejapanesepage.com/tag/kanji-pronunciation/

[knolax]

I actually count English spelling as a strength and not a weakness, otherwise we'd have the situation of multiple semantically distinct and unrelated words being spelled the same[0] while at the same time having to maintain distinct orthographies for every minor dialect[1].

[0] https://ko.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%88%98%EB%8F%84_(%EB%8F%9...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_differen...

[imtringued]

Actually kanji only don't make sense in the context of only reading them. First learn how to speak and listen. Then as soon as you write a bunch of kanji you will realize how consistent the stroke order is and that there are a lot of repeating elements (loads and loads of boxes...). There are still some annoying exceptions but those are the minority. Learning the meaning of each kanji will make it very easy to connect the kanji with the intended word.

[pyuser583]

In other words, exposure to professional, high quality writing that rigorously follows the rules of English.

Unlike most speakers.

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

I'd say that nothing is learned through instructions. There always is an element of use that turns instructions into understanding.

[saulrh]

> Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words

Funny you should say that in defense of classical methods of teaching literacy, which for me consisted of eight years of memorizing lists of words and regurgitating them on weekly spelling quizzes.

Weekly spelling quizzes. Memorized lists of ten to fifteen words at a time.

All the way into high school.

[remarkEon]

I had the same methods. Ironically I’ve learned more about the English language in attempting to learn (or re-learn) other languages (Spanish, German, French, Latin). So idk, I inclined to buy the argument that teaching the parts of all the systems is a better start than teaching one system at a time, and doing it through brute force memorization.

[onion2k]

Those lists aren't picked at random. They're designed to expose learners to words with letter groups, structures, silent letters, etc they might not encounter otherwise. You learned about spelling by seeing them.

[benhurmarcel]

During primary school I switched to a place that did a weekly dictation. So like every Monday, first thing in the morning was a half-hour of the professor reading a page of text and you handed off your copy of it, you lose one point per mistake basically (out of 20 points, the standard in France).

That helped tremendously with my spelling.

[MandieD]

Ours were thematically grouped, usually by phoneme. For example, I remember that one week in elementary was /hw/ ("what","when","whichever").

I never had to study for spelling, probably because reading was my favorite thing to do. Well, until I had one teacher who tested that we'd memorized the list of words...

Explicitly studying spelling ended after 5th grade (rural elementary school in Texas, late 80s/early 90s)

Spellcheck is a wonderful tool, but relying on it can lead to embarrassing results. I would not want the kids in my life using it until they have their own grasp of spelling.

[dnqthao]

Like English spelling has any rules. There are a lot of irregularities with English spelling that students need to learn by heart how the word is spelled compared to how it is pronounced.

[mrr54]

English spelling absolutely has rules. The famous 'ghoti' example (where supposedly it should be able to be pronounced 'fish' because of 'gh' in rough, 'ti' in 'nation', etc.) is nonsense because there's only one way that word can be pronounced in English and that's 'goatee'.

Irregularities don't mean it doesn't have rules. The most common 1-2k words are much less regular than the rest of the language, but learning how they're spelt is not remotely difficult for children (no adult that doesn't have a learning disability struggles to remember how to spell 'much' or 'about'). The rest of the language is pretty much regular.

[shard]

Funny, I always pronounced "ghoti" like "Gotti".

[Dylan16807]

Slight difference in vowel, otherwise the same, that's valid enough. English isn't great at telling you the exact vowel, probably because people keep making them shift.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

English is spoken with such a wide variety of accents that you can just about get away with using random vowels sounds and still be understood.

[shaded-enmity]

Obligatory "What if English were phonetically consistent":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU

[grawprog]

English spelling has plenty of rules. It's just inconsistent and full of exceptions because English has its roots in many different languages and unfortunately inherits rules from all of them as well as having a bunch of its own.

[knolax]

> Learning to spell isn't memorizing lists of words, it's learning the rules of English and how words are actually put together

Learning those rules involve learning the orthographies of French, Latin, and Greek, etc. as well as their associated transliteration schemes(usually multiple per language), and memorizing which one was used for which specific word(Hamburg[0] vs. burgher[1] vs. bourgeoisie[2] vs. Berger[3]), as well as words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor[4]). I don't think most people actually learn this.

[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/burgher

[2] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeoisie

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berger

[4] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor

Edit: See comment below for better source.

[jacobolus]

> words where the etymology was erroneous (ex. scissor https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissor)

Seems the better link is https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scissors

Apparently “chisel” comes from the same source.

[xmprt]

That's what the reading is for

[gvjddbnvdrbv]

> The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment.

Speaking as a dyslexic person this is garbage. Learning to spell required weekly word lists, spelling tests and hours of study. The memory skills this built have seriously helped me in my life.

[big_chungus]

That worked for you, good. But my personal anecdote agrees with jacobolus, and one anecdote is as good as another. I completed all the spelling books through HS by 4th grade because I read so much. The downside was, of course, that I would regularly mispronounce words.

This comes down to the fact that schools don't let students learn in their optimal manners.

[thayne]

This hints at the biggest problem with our education system. Different children learn in different ways. Word lists and spelling tests may have been effective for you, but they weren't for me (reading hundreds of books otoh did improve my spelling). Unfortunately, I don't really have a practical solution.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

ISTR there is no scientific basis for “children learn in different ways”. If a child has dyslexia or something like that, sure, that can affect things, but good teaching strategies should work for the vast majority of children.

[thayne]

I'm not referencing the different learning styles ("auditory", "visual", "kinesthetic", etc.). I'm saying different people have different strengths and weaknesses and that effects how you learn.

> good teaching strategies should work for the vast majority of children

In my experience, good teaching strategies usually includes teaching the same thing in a variety of different ways, so that hopefully at least one of the ways is effective for each student.

[BlueTemplar]

It's kind of obvious: teach different children differently? Classes with large numbers of children should probably be rare.

[thayne]

well, yes. that's why I had the qualifier "practical". smaller classes are more expensive, and at least where I live, the trend has been the opposite where class sizes are increasing.

[BlueTemplar]

Is it "practical" if you end up getting worse results with bigger classes ? I'm willing to bet that "undereducated" children (and then adults !) are going to end up costing much more than ones with a better education !

[sethammons]

That short feedback loop is the only thing that worked for me. Spelling/vocab lists all through school. I Could slog through that and get an A, but forget spelling next week. Typing in chat or essays would give the red squiggly line. Instead of right-clicking and getting the spelling, I would backspace and try again. That is how my spelling improved.

[WalterBright]

> I have seen no evidence that spellcheck reduces people’s ability to learn spelling.

Spellcheck has shown me that I've been misspelling certain words forever :-)

[mattnewton]

To play devils advocate here, I have always been a terrible speller and it doesn't affect me because all surfaces I use have spell check. Occassionally I will butcher something so bad I confuse the spell checker and Google it, but those are so few and far between I don't feel like I missed out memorizing list after list of arbitrary word roots and remembering if this is loaned from greek, a romance language like french, or old german.

[johnchristopher]

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-18158665

N=1: I feel like - and I am 99% certain - that my grammatical and spelling skills have decreased since I started using the internet heavily.

[filoleg]

I think it heavily depends on the kind of content you are consuming. I know it is anecdata, but my personal grammar and spelling skills went all the way up since I started using internet heavily (which was very noticeable to me, since english isn't my native language). And while I use a lot of incorrect grammar and spelling when talking to friends, I usually do it out of convenience (to shorten words, etc.), not because I don't know the proper grammar/spelling.

[isodude]

I would like to make the argument that reading/writing HN have made my English a bit better in recent years.

[johnchristopher]

English isn't my first language. Yet, I believe my english grammar is getting worse even if I read a lot of English everyday. I blame this on globish though and the fact that it's relatively rare to get corrected on grammar mistakes around here.

[Mirioron]

On the other hand, the internet pretty much taught me English. Sure, we had English classes in school, but the internet gave me an immense amount of practical experience. Most of my peers, particularly those who didn't use the internet, finished school with significantly worse English than I did. Spell-checking has been pretty useful, but probably not vital.

[catalogia]

I generally think that the sort of knowledge best learned with flash cards is probably knowledge not memorizing in the first place, with the truth of this being proportional to the size of the dataset being learned. For sets in the neighborhood of 200 or less, I don't think it's a big problem. Chemistry classes asking you to memorize the mapping of element names ⟷ element symbols seems okay. But memorizing the spelling of several hundred to thousands of words? That seems like a job for a machine.

[OnlineGladiator]

I don't have studies, but the idea is they never have to learn it because the computer just does it for them. So why bother?

It's anecdotal, but growing up the students who relied on their calculators never really learned to do mental math the same. The difference was palpable.

But I'm not a formal teacher or expert when it comes to the psychology of learning, so I also welcome studies on this subject.

[jacobolus]

Spellcheck is not like a handheld electronic calculator. It doesn’t write for you.

It’s more like a system that would let you practice doing arithmetic with pen and paper but then immediately show errors.

Look at how people practice board games nowadays: they try making their own moves but get a precise computer analysis to reveal when they have made a blunder on the spot, for real-time feedback. This is not the same as just watching the computer play against itself.

[OnlineGladiator]

You're thinking of it as a pedagological tool. I'm thinking of it as a crutch. The truth is in-between and will vary from person to person, but I'd bet money most people lean on it more than they learn from it.

[ses1984]

But does developing your spelling actually matter?

Maybe being able to spell perfectly is about as useful a skill as putting shoes on a horse or chipping a piece of stone into an arrowhead.

What if 100% of the time that s devoted to spelling was devoted to something else, like just reading?

[OnlineGladiator]

> But does developing your spelling actually matter?

I don't think it does. I think it's similar to how people used to lament the loss of the bard who'd memorize songs/stories as reading became increasingly popular. I was just responding on how it changes how we think.

I do think mental math matters, but most people disagree so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Mirioron]

I also think mental math matters, but I think that people who end up using simple math a lot will simply pick up the ability to do mental math as necessary.

[imron]

> It doesn’t write for you.

Modern ones kind of do - for example, gmail's spell checker now comes with predictive input.