It's been a while now that I can write Chinese words more correctly than I can write words of my native language (English). With English, I frequently misspell words, but since I practice writing Chinese everyday, I rarely write a Chinese character incorrectly.

So, basically, I think it would be cool to use Skritter to load and practice English words, only via typing (so no handwriting).

What do people think?

Haha I can't imagine ever being at that stage. How long have you been studying Chinese?

I think there are probably other tools for studying English spellings.

about 10 years.

Other tools? Such as?

One that springs to mind is memrise.com, but I'm sure a search of google would bring up others.

I did a search, but I didn't find anything with spaced repetition

there are a lot of free "spelling apps" on the market. just search for "spelling" and you find dozens.

hmm, does anyone on the site use one of these apps? Any recommendations? I'd preferable want one with spaced repetition, and one that I could choose which words go in

Memrise is spaced repetition and I'm pretty sure you can make your own lists. I'm not sure if you can do just writing tests as opposed to writing and definition. I used it a lot for Chinese and it worked well. It's quite strongly geared to mnemonics but Its a well designed system and you don't need to use them.

Did you look at Duolingo? Though it requires you to have another base language (and Chinese is still not released).

I'm assuming you might have considered this (but for the sake of discussion) how about making an Anki list? Only include words you actually misspell. What kind of format do you want the questions to be? Missing letters? Definitions, maybe with the first and last letter and number of total letters... misspelled words that you have to correct...

also this has some helpful suggestions, though not entirely related to the post,
http://www.spellzone.com/unit02/page1.cfm

Of course there are always those quirky special case words and borrowed words from other languages with obscure spellings, but I've always felt as long as I can speak English with a native accent then I can spell.

If anything I feel I've learned more words and spellings trying to translate from Chinese back into English.

@ Bohan

You need to read books.

Thanks for the replies guys.
@icecream. Reading isn't spelling. Recognizing a word is different than writing it. Your reply wasn't useful at all, but it did sound a bit condescending.

It's the truth! If you read a lot your spelling will improve in tandem. There is a reason why schools stop doing spelling tests at a certain age. You are supposd to use higher-level thinking skills as you get older.

Granted, I will admit the method of translating from Chinese into English would help you improve in both languages instead of just one. You might want to do that if you don't like to read books.

@Bohan

so did you decide how you're gonna tackle spelling?

a couple more articles that I found interesting
http://www.ldonline.org/article/How_Spelling_Supports_Reading
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/how-to-improve-your-spelling-skills.html

I have a vested interest in how to learn English spelling, since I'm trying to teach Taiwanese kids how to spell. I use various games, memorization and testing. It seems they can always spell the word when we play games, but when it comes to the test they forget entirely! Maybe need to make the test seem less like a test...

and this one, a book in google books,
http://goo.gl/T3Jxk (Spelling: Approaches to Teaching and Assessment
By Peter Westwood)

I would actually agree with icecream. Reading is a great way to improve recognition, understanding and spelling. Then if you want to target words perhaps follow Russel's suggestion. But reading is actually the least boring method!

I'm not sure that reading alone is the best way to improve spelling. I suppose some improvement does rub off, but to really improve you have to find out what you do and don't know, have the mistakes corrected, and then practice trying to recall them (isn't this basically how Skritter works?). It is perfectly possible to be able to read words many times without necessarily being able to recall their spelling.

As an anecdotal example, my late grandfather who left school at twelve was a prodigious several book-a-week reader for many years (classics, modern literature, historical non-fiction- everything really- he was running out of things to read at our local library) who often couldn't spell the words on a shopping list correctly.

This is very complicated issue. Reading books exposes you to edited writing which usually serves as a good model.

Almost all of the spelling adults do comes from procedural memory. I don't actually think about the spelling of individual words as I type; the right spelling comes out naturally and quickly without any thought. It's only after writing that I go back and check for mistakes. If there are mistakes, I try to fix my technique. If you spend inordinate amounts of time working with single words it takes away from the time you could be using stringing together sentences and paragraphs.

As for your grandfather: it's a common phenomenon. I didn't make one spelling mistake writing this post but I was unable to spell the words "physical education" one day at school simply because I am so used to typing that my hand forgot how to spell.

@Russel
I might take your suggestion and use Anki, but...we'll see.

Basically, what I try to do with spelling that I never used to do, is try to use the spell checking features on email and smartphones to take note where I misspell words, and if I'm not in a rush, actually erase the word and retype it.
I think I misspell words a lot because I haven't cared about it for many years. I'm teaching English now, and I misspell words quite frequently when I'm writing things out on the board. I don't really feel embarrassed; it's just that this has made me realized that my spelling is much worse than I thought it was.

Somebody mentioned something about typing words on this thread. What I think about that is, when you're typing a word out, and misspell it, it often shows that the word is misspelled. If you think you misspelled it, you delete it. So, basically, typing is different than writing with a marker/pen in front of a bunch of people.

alright, I've just made my first Anki for English spelling list. This is my first time actually using Anki. I tried using it for Chinese a long time ago, but couldn't figure out how to have 3 card sides for pinyin, English, and characters, so I gave up on that.
So far it's working out great for this new thing that I'm doing.

The way I'm doing it is quite simple. I'm just typing the definitions on the front side of the cards, and the actual words I misspell on the back side of the cards.

Thanks for the suggestions!