Spelling
Why is English spelling so hard?
Because it is. English is measurably harder to learn to read and spell than many of other European languages.
English is the slow one, and it has been measured
A study across English and twelve other European languages tested children at the end of their first year of school. In most of those languages, children had reached accurate, reasonably fluent reading of simple words. English was one of the exceptions — the researchers described the rate of development in English as more than twice as slow as in the languages with straightforward spelling.
They put it down to how deep the spelling system is. A Finnish or Italian child mostly needs one skill: match letters to sounds. An English child needs that skill and, alongside it, a growing store of words that simply have to be recognised.
Around forty-four sounds, far more ways to write them
English has roughly forty-four distinct sounds and several hundred accepted ways of spelling them. The same letters can behave completely differently from one word to the next. Those four letters above — ough — say something different in though, through, cough, bough and thorough.
Silent letters are usually doing a job
The g in sign looks pointless until you meet signature and signal. The c in muscle explains itself in muscular. English spelling often preserves the family a word belongs to rather than the way it happens to sound, which is why two, twice and twelve all keep their tw.
Some words cannot be worked out by listening at all
There, their and they’re sound identical. So do to, too and two. No amount of careful sounding-out separates them, because the thing that separates them is meaning. That is a different skill from phonics, and it arrives later — so a child can be genuinely good at reading aloud and still write their when they meant there.
The curriculum knows all this
The national curriculum sets out spelling year by year in a separate appendix, and includes word lists that children are expected to learn in Years 3 and 4 and again in Years 5 and 6. If your child is bringing home words to learn rather than rules to apply, that is the UK system to teach them spelling.