Tonic for improving your spelling!

Mnemonics is a system which uses certain patterns of letters, ideas, or associations to help a person to remember something. It is extremely useful for the learners of English to memorize the spellings of confusing words.

Many people are often confused about the spellings of 'stationary' and 'stationery'. It can be sorted with the help of a mnemonic. Stationery has er in it as in the case of paper. So stationery refers to paper, pencil etc!

'Grammar' is another word which many people spell as grammer. Try this mnemonic: ‘Grammar is an art of using a language correctly’. Link the ‘ar’ in grammar with art!

Another widely misspelled word is 'arithmetic'. This word is often misspelled as arithmatic because of its resemblance with the more common word mathematics. So, what is the way out? Learn this simple sentence which is a funny full-form of arithmetic: 'A Rat In The House May Eat The Ice Cream!'

And the next one is ‘separate’. It is often wrongly spelt as seperate. Why don’t you try this interesting mnemonic? There was a farmer named Sep. One day his wife saw a rat. She yelled – “Sep, a rat – Eeeee!”.

Crazy English pronunciation. Part 2

When I was in fifth class in which I started learning the spellings and pronunciation of English words, my English teacher used to tweak my ear for mispronouncing the word 'hood'. I used to pronounce hood with a long u – something like /hoood/ instead of /hud/. My budding mind, as in the case of any children, thought all the words with ‘oo’ should be pronounced in the same way as in food, fool, noon, mood, soon, moon, loo etc.

Crazily enough, while a number of common words like moon, food, noon, broom, zoom, boon, proof, roof etc are pronounced with a long ‘u’ sound, so many other words with the same pattern take only a short ‘u’ in pronunciation e.g. book, cook, hood, look, wood, foot and so on.

If you think that the confusion is over just after learning these two rules, what about the words like ‘door’ and ‘floor’? Though they follow the same pattern of spelling, the pronunciation is different!

Is that all? Wait! A fourth small group of words (thank God, only two words in this category!) behaves in a totally different way: blood and flood. The ‘oo’ in them rhymes with the ‘u’ in ‘mud’ ‘thud’ and ‘dull’ !

Isn’t English crazy? Please comment…