Comment on Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
If you’re talking about my messages, it’s because I swipe too fast and don’t check the message 9 times before posting. All sorts of weird nonsense slips through every day, some of which I edit later.
If you’re talking about how native English speakers spell, you’ll find all sorts of weird mistakes that seem to stem from the fact that English is pure chaos, and navigating this mess is about as easy as programming with a magnetized needle and a hard disk platter. The way I see it, mispronouncing every word in a consistent manner helps me remember how they are written. The trick is to use a consistent spelling system of another language to form an auditory memory of the spelling.
So in my mind, every word comes with three entries: what the word means, how it’s pronounced and how it’s written. Memorizing a combination of letters is hard, but memorizing a funny sound that you can later decrypt back to a sequence of letters is easier. That connection has to be 100% consistent, which is exactly what English can’t offer, but many other languages come pretty close.
If your first language happens to have a fairly consistent spelling system, you can totally use it to memorize how English words are spelled. Native English speakers are obviously completely screwed, and that’s why spelling bees are a thing and why this post exists.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
How is swipe writing supposed to work? I’ve never seen it in action by someone IRL, and whenever I’ve tried it myself, it seemed to be way too much hassle vs just typing shit and using predicts to auto complete.
gt24@lemmy.world 5 days ago
What I like to call “glide texting” is when (on a phone) you put your finger on the first letter and drag your finger to the next letter and the next and so on without lifting your finger until you reach the last letter. Letters that are repeated (like in too) are just treated as one letter for this. Your phone will then “guess” what word could be represented by “what you just drew” and give you some options above the keyboard (3 for my phone) for alternatives in case things were guessed wrong. This requires your keyboard to support that feature (and the basic Android keyboard does support it). On earlier phones, the SwiftKey keyboard was used to do such things (that company was later on purchased by Microsoft by the way).
There are two issues I want to highlight with regards to glide texting.
First is where several words can be represented by one “glide text”. I feel (can’t prove) that the phone does use the context of your sentence to assist with word selection. However, you sometimes have to be annoyed and type out words letter by letter to get things entered.
The second issue is that your phone learns from you and from the “intelligent population”. If you type in a wrong spelling (perhaps by not entering in the last letter) then your phone “learns” that word and starts to use it when glide texting. Second is when a person glide texts incorrectly (for “hello”, instead of swiping over HELO they swipe over GWKO or BELO or something like that) and then that person taps the “Hello” entry for what that glide should mean. Now the phone starts thinking glide texts for a specific word (from anyone in the world) must mean some completely different word because the majority of people seem to indicate that.
Still, glide texting is usually a faster way to enter text on the phone. That being said, issues can be quite interesting when they do appear.
pleasestopasking@reddthat.com 5 days ago
Swipe typing is the cursive of smartphones. I love it, it’s so much faster than regular typing (for me at least). I didn’t realize how uncommon it is until several people commented on me using it.
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
What? I didn’t know this was rare. This thing is brilliant. Why would it be uncommon.
pleasestopasking@reddthat.com 5 days ago
I’m with ya. I was shocked to learn that there are people who don’t use it. Keyboard typing with your thumbs feels like Blackberry energy.