4 ms·
I think there's some sort of "deep learning" analog going on, where we memorize a lot and it subsequently leads to generalization (that can still sometimes over
by version_five 5y ago
I think there's some sort of "deep learning" analog going on, where we memorize a lot and it subsequently leads to generalization (that can still sometimes overfit and be wrong). For me anyway, I write and read a lot, and having broad exposure to words coming from different root languages etc gives a good feeling for what spellings make sense. At the same time, I'd guess the majority of my adult vocabulary has come out of books, or at less adjacent to them, so it's pretty uncommon to be writing a word I've never seen before
- theonemind 5y agoI used to read a lot in my teens and I agree. I could spell difficult to spell words I didn't even know I knew how to spell, and it felt like at some level, I didn't explicitly remember how to spell them at all. It seemed pretty much impossible to give me a valid English word and have me misspell it. I could feel them sort of matching a cluster in my brain, like "by the way it sounds, it has to be like one of those words that does this thing"--I didn't think that, I could feel it as I spelled it out, and I'd have no conscious idea what the grouping is. I'm sure my brain had an unlabelled network of neurons that knew how to spell words in English that came from old Norse but got mangled by French influence and crazy random stuff. People underestimate the amazing pattern recognition the brain can do if you feed it obscene amounts of input.