Like all good Indians (the kind that go to school on elephants 
) I mispell the word “believe” as “beleive” from time to time. Fortunately I think I found the perfect way to remember the right way to spell it. A friend on a mailing lists had this to say when I expressed disgust at misspelling that word again:
“Remember, beLIEve has a LIE in it.”
Thanks, that should fix my brain.
My favorite is tomorrow. If it were not for Spellbound, I would have misspelled it anyways.
Easy way to remember it:
I before E – except after C
funny.
but ei do not usually pronounce [i:] i suppose.
Hello there!
This may be an odd request, but could you tell me what the style of the desk you bought from Target is called? I have one myself, love it, and want more – but can’t find anymore on their site! I tried Google’ing “target desk”, and came across your desk picture posted on Flickr. Unfortunately, I can’t recall what it was called – but if you knew, maybe I can ask the folks at Target if it’s still out there, without having to try to describe it.
Any insight is very much appreciated!
Cordially,
Emmalee
[...]It’s funny that you believe,(no pun intended) that you made an indian mistake because I’m not an indian and I’ve made the same mistake for I don’t know how many years. Here’s another memory technique: Just remember that belIEve has an IE in it:) Besides the fun i also wanted to say thanks for the fonts I downloaded at your site. They should become pretty useful once I learn how to use them. Your site rocks.[...]
Don’t be negative Carthik! I still believe in you, ha ha! Miss you!! (I use FH’s method)
WOW! this is a good technique for me to remember! There was another word
for which I always had red re-marks in school “their” – I would inevitablely mis-spell it as “thier”!
haha! I do it with receive… of course it’s the opposite… I do it like ‘recieve’. What’s the trick in remembering this one? Is it like “receive has nothing to do with believe”?
haha…
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first time here… like your blog very much Carthik…
very interesting, this spelling thing…
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i shall add one more trick i learnt in school (and i suppose that’s now stuck in my brains with SuperGlue3.5PRO)…
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how in the world does a child remember how to spell things like ‘lieutenants’(pronounced as ‘left-a-nents’ in UK English)?!… though i never (i think it stands true till date) felt the need to spell it–except for on occasions like these–, our teacher told us the ‘how-to’ anyways… you just break it up — ‘LIE-U-TEN-ANTs’ !… i felt it was a really lame way to try remember, yet, now i find that it does stick!…
i suppose, gathering from your example here as well, its the LIE that makes all the difference… haha… ;D…
btw… @madcap…
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so often we code things up and confuse them… we often forget the simple ways to do things…
yes, receive is not like believe… but then, both follow simple grammatical rules for vowels…
remember this from anywhere?:
“i before e
except after c
or when sounding like a
as in neighbor and weigh”
i think the first two, non complex lines, are enough to answer our queries here…
(btw, the Brit version of this mnemonic verse seems simpler, if you may,:
when the sound is ee
it’s i before e
except after c )
okay them, nice commenting here…
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