Why children write Russian words exactly as they hear them

Why hearing is not enough

In Russian, not everything is written as heard. Unstressed vowels change sound, paired consonants are stunned, some consonants are not pronounced. For a child who doesn't write much in Russian, it's a very opaque system.

He hears Malako and honestly records what he hears. To write “milk”, he needs not only to know the word, but also to understand that writing is not always checked by direct hearing.

What mistakes occur most often

Frequent errors are unstressed vowels: Malako, Wada, Gara. Another group is the voiced and deaf consonants: a rope instead of a fairy tale, a wheezing instead of a mushroom. Separately, there are unpronounceable consonants: the sun instead of the sun.

In bilinguals, these mistakes can last longer, because there is less Russian writing in a child’s life: he does not see a word every day in textbooks, chat rooms, ads, school and assignments.

What helps

What is needed is not a rote of rules, but a comprehensible algorithm: I heard the word, found a dangerous place, thought, can I check it? For example: water - water, mushroom - mushrooms, fairy tale - a fairy tale.

Short dictations with discussion, cards of “dangerous places”, lists of words from your child’s life and tasks work well, where he does not just rewrite, but learns to notice the problem.

How not to discourage the desire to write

If you emphasize each mistake in red, your child quickly decides that writing in Russian is always a failure. It is better to choose one topic at a time: today we look for only unstressed vowels, tomorrow – only paired consonants.

So literacy gradually becomes not a set of random prohibitions, but a system in which a child understands why a word is spelled that way. A more general path to writing was discussed separately in the article. How to teach a child to write in Russian abroad.