How to Practice English Spelling on Your Phone in a Few Minutes a Day

You do not have an hour a day for English. Very few people do. You have the bus ride, the line at the pharmacy, the five minutes before a meeting starts, the time while the rice cooks. And you have a phone that is already in your hand during all of them.

That is enough for spelling. Spelling is one of the few parts of a language that improves well in short, frequent sessions, and the research on memory suggests that a few minutes spread across the day and the week can do more than a long weekly study session. The hard part is not finding the time. It is using the phone in a way that actually builds memory, instead of the way phones usually work, which is to do the remembering for you.

This guide shows you how to set your phone up for spelling practice, what to do in each session, where to find the words, and how to keep the habit going for months rather than days.

Why a few minutes works

Two well-established findings from memory research explain why short practice on a phone can work so well.

The first is the spacing effect. In the 1880s, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus measured how quickly he forgot lists he had memorized, and found that reviewing them at intervals kept them in memory far longer than repeating them all at once. Many hundreds of later experiments have confirmed the pattern; a large 2006 review by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues brought them together. For spelling, it means that five minutes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday will usually beat fifteen minutes on Sunday.

The second is the testing effect, also called retrieval practice. When you try to bring a word out of memory, the memory gets stronger, even more than when you study the word again. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke showed this clearly in 2006. In a review of study techniques in 2013, John Dunlosky and colleagues rated practice testing and spaced practice as the two most useful methods they examined.

A phone is perfect for both. It is with you at many points in the day, which makes spacing easy, and a few minutes is the right length for recalling a small set of words from memory. A 2009 study by Nate Kornell found that people learned more vocabulary when they practiced flashcards in one large stack, so each card came back after a long gap, than in small stacks crammed together. Spacing helped about 90 percent of the learners, yet most of them believed the cramming had worked better.

Turn off the helpers before you practice

Your phone is designed to stop you making spelling mistakes. Autocorrect fixes your typing, and predictive text offers the next word before you finish it. That is helpful when you send a message. It is harmful when you are trying to learn, because the phone does the remembering and your memory never has to work.

So before a practice session, turn them off, or practice in a place where they do not operate. On an iPhone, the switches for auto-correction and predictive text are in the Settings app, in the keyboard settings, which recent versions of iOS place under General, then Keyboard. On most Android phones, they are in the keyboard's own settings, usually under a heading such as text correction.

You do not have to leave them off all day. Some learners keep a second keyboard language with autocorrect off, and switch to it only for practice. Others simply notice, when they type a message, which words the phone corrects, and add those words to a list. We look at the bigger question of what autocorrect does to spelling in why spell-check and autocorrect can make your spelling worse.

Listen, then type: the core exercise

The best single spelling exercise for a learner is dictation. You hear a word spoken, you write it from memory, and you check it. It trains the link between sound and letters, which is where most learners' errors begin, and it is a pure form of retrieval practice.

On a phone, dictation is easy to set up. You need a voice that says the word and a place to type it. A recorded voice is better than a robotic one, and a voice that is not your own is better than reading the word yourself, because your own accent hides the sounds you tend to miss.

The check matters as much as the attempt. Do not just look to see whether you were right or wrong. Look at exactly which letters went wrong. Did you write "recieve" or "receive"? Did you leave out a doubled letter, or a silent one, or the -ed at the end? Each mistake tells you something specific, and the reading researcher Linnea Ehri's work suggests that it is the link between each sound and its letters that builds a word in memory. A vague "wrong" teaches you much less than "the i and the e are in the wrong order".

Spelling.School is built around this exercise: a recorded American English voice says the word, you type it and press Enter, and the app shows exactly which letters went wrong and why, then schedules the word for review with spaced repetition.

A routine for a few minutes

You do not need a complicated plan. A short routine done most days is better than a perfect plan done twice. Here is one that fits into about five minutes.

1. Review first. Spend a minute or two on words you have practiced before, especially the ones you missed last time. These are the words most in danger of being forgotten.
2. Add a few new words. Three to five is plenty for a short session. More than that and the reviews pile up within a week.
3. Use one word in a sentence. Type a short sentence with one of today's words in it, from memory. This connects the spelling to meaning and to real writing.

When you get a word wrong, resist the urge to type it correctly ten times in a row. Repetition straight after a mistake feels useful, but the correct spelling is still on the screen in front of you, so your memory is not doing any work. Look at the error, notice exactly which letters were wrong, type the word correctly once while saying it to yourself, and then move on. The word should come back later, after a gap, when you have to bring it out of memory again. That second attempt, a day or two later, is the one that does the learning.

The order matters. Reviews first, because a word that is about to fade is worth more attention than a new word. New words second, and only a few. The question of how many new words is worth thinking about honestly, because adding too many is the most common reason people give up; we work through the numbers in how many new words a day you should learn.

Where your words should come from

The best words to practice are the ones you actually need. Lists of "the most misspelled words in English" are a reasonable start, but they are based on other people's mistakes. Your own mistakes are more useful.

Start a note on your phone called "my words". Every time autocorrect fixes something you typed, every time you look up a spelling, every time someone corrects your writing, add the word. Within two weeks you will have a list that is worth more than any published one, because every word on it is a word you use and get wrong.

If you are preparing for an exam, add words from the topics that exam uses, such as the environment, education or health for IELTS and TOEFL essays. If you write for work, add the vocabulary of your field. If you are just starting, a graded list that begins with everyday words is a better choice than a list of difficult ones, because the everyday words are the ones you will use most often. For a step-by-step method, see how to find your own worst spelling words.

Tie practice to something you already do

The hard part of daily practice is not the five minutes. It is remembering to do it. Two lines of research on habits are useful here.

The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer has studied what he calls implementation intentions, simple plans in the form "when X happens, I will do Y". Plans like this make people more likely to follow through than general goals do. "I will practice spelling more" is a goal. "When I sit down on the bus in the morning, I will open my spelling practice before anything else" is an implementation intention, and it is more likely to happen.

A 2010 study by Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London followed people building new daily habits and found that it took a median of 66 days, a little over two months, for a behavior to become automatic, with wide differences between people. The same study found that missing a single day did not seriously damage the habit. That is worth remembering. If you miss a day, the habit is not broken. Simply do it the next day.

What a phone does not do well

A phone is excellent for short, frequent recall of single words. It is less good at some other things, and it is honest to say so.

Long writing, such as an essay or a report, is hard to do well on a small screen, and it is where you find out whether your spelling holds up when your attention is on ideas. Do some writing on a computer or on paper too. Phones also bring distractions: a message arrives in the middle of your practice and the session is over. Turning on a do-not-disturb mode for five minutes helps more than you might expect.

There is also a question about handwriting. Brain-imaging research by Karin James and colleagues suggests that writing letters by hand, more than typing or tracing them, helps young children's brains learn to process letters. For adults learning to spell words they can already write, the evidence that typing is worse is much weaker, and what seems to matter most is recalling the word from memory. If your exam is handwritten, though, practice some words on paper as well.

What to do next

Tonight, take two minutes to set up your phone. Create a "my words" note, and decide where you will practice: a dictation tool, a recording and the notes app, or a spelling app. Then pick one moment in your day that happens every day, and attach your practice to it.

Tomorrow, do the routine once: review, a few new words, one sentence. If you want an app that handles the voice, the checking and the scheduling, Spelling.School runs in the browser on your phone, tablet or computer, starts with a short warm-up to find your level, and gives every account 14 days of everything before the free plan, which keeps every review and three new words a day. Whatever you use, the method is the same: a few minutes, from memory, most days.

Questions people ask

Can you really improve your English spelling in a few minutes a day?

Yes, if the minutes are used well. Memory research shows that short sessions spread across days build longer-lasting memory than long sessions crammed together, and that trying to recall a word is more effective than reading it again. A few minutes a day of recalling words from memory, with regular review of the ones you miss, adds up to real progress over weeks and months.

Should I turn off autocorrect to improve my spelling?

It helps to turn it off while you practice, because autocorrect fixes your mistakes before your memory has to work. You can turn it back on for everyday messages if you like. Some learners also keep a list of every word autocorrect changes, since those are exactly the words they need to practice.

Is typing as good as handwriting for learning spelling?

For adults, there is no strong evidence that typing is worse than handwriting for learning to spell words. Research suggests handwriting helps young children learn the shapes of letters, but for older learners the most important factor is recalling the word from memory. If you will write by hand in an exam, include some handwritten practice as well.

How many new English words should I learn a day?

For most learners, three to five new words a day is a good pace if you also review older words. Every new word adds reviews in the days and weeks after you learn it, so adding many words at once soon creates more review than you have time for. A small, steady number is easier to keep up and leads to better long-term memory.

What is the best way to practice spelling on a phone?

Dictation is one of the best methods: listen to a word spoken by a clear voice, type it from memory, and check exactly which letters went wrong. Review words you have missed before adding new ones, and bring them back after a day, a few days and a week. Turning off autocorrect and predictive text during practice makes sure your memory, not the phone, does the work.

How long does it take to make spelling practice a daily habit?

A 2010 study of habit formation found that new daily behaviors took a median of about two months to become automatic, with large differences between people. The same study found that missing one day did not seriously damage the habit. Linking practice to something you already do every day, such as a commute, makes it easier to keep going.

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