C's and S's etc

I've always been quite good at spelling, but I am not sure how. I think it is just from reading a lot when small and familiarity, rather than from rules. As you noted, rules seem inconsistent and arbitrary.

Double letters are another confusion. When to have two n, m, s, etc. Plus you have words like borough or cough which make little spelling sense. 

Knowing that English is a mixture of Anglo Saxon (Germanic), Norse (from the Vikings), French (from the Normans), Latin and Greek (from the church and scholars), plus some Celtic names and other adopted words from all over, does not make spelling easier, but explains the mixed rules.

Apparently, a thing called 'the great vowel shift' in the 14-16th centuries is a reason words aren't spelt how they sound, when spelling was standardized. Making some letters silent happened at the same time.

I've always been quite good at spelling, but I am not sure how. I think it is just from reading a lot when small and familiarity, rather than from rules. As you noted, rules seem inconsistent and arbitrary.

Double letters are another confusion. When to have two n, m, s, etc. Plus you have words like borough or cough which make little spelling sense. 

Knowing that English is a mixture of Anglo Saxon (Germanic), Norse (from the Vikings), French (from the Normans), Latin and Greek (from the church and scholars), plus some Celtic names and other adopted words from all over, does not make spelling easier, but explains the mixed rules.

Apparently, a thing called 'the great vowel shift' in the 14-16th centuries is a reason words aren't spelt how they sound, when spelling was standardized. Making some letters silent happened at the same time.

I wonder why they didn't standardise grammar t the same time as spelling?

I don't think I would of coped with how others were taught, we didn't have remedial classes at my school and we never got out of PE, so I just refused to do it.

I know where most of the English language comes from, many of our sk words are from Norse, like skirt as are =b y place name endings. One of the things I find interesting are languages like Welsh, Irish and Scot's Gaelic that don't have as many letters as English although they use the same alphabet. In Scottish Gaelic the sk sound is produced with s-g,, in Welsh one F is a V sound and two F's an F sound. W is another interesting one it's literally a double U, one of the things that English speakers have real problems with, along with the LL, which is a soft chl sound rather than the cl that English people think it is. It's also pronounced in a different part of the mouth and is aspirated from the middle of the mouth rather like a cat hiss. In Scot Gaelic a th sound is made with the tongue against the bottom teeth unlike English where the tongue is against the top teeth. Before standardisation TH had its own symbol, a rune called thorn, which looks like a P but with a triangle instead of a semi circle.

Words like 'precise' exercise' 'neice' 'nice, when to use an S or a C and as for nessercary I can never remember how to spell it, so I rarely use it when writing.

When to use two letter in the middle of a word is another muddle.

Then you've got Q's and K's, how do you decide which of those to use, let alone which witch?

I wasn't taught phonetics, I don't think, I know I wasn't taught grammar, the thinking at the time was that we'd pick it up just from reading.

I'm dyslexic too