Nurture your spelling by playing this KS3 quiz on words beginning at nu.
"Find out what your gift is and nurture it." - Katy Perry
Some languages, such as Italian and Welsh, are phonetic. This means that when you read the language aloud, you have a reasonable chance of pronouncing words correctly because the correspondence between each grapheme (a single letter or combination of letters) and the sound it makes is regular. Phonetic languages are not especially difficult to spell, since words are written exactly as they sound.
English is not like these languages. For instance, how many different ways can the -e- sound in a word like "tree" be written? There are at least five graphemes for this sound: e, ea, ee, ey and y.
So in order to become good at spelling, memory must be involved. If you consider the word "nurture", for example, how would you guess it might be spelled, if you had never seen the word? Pronounce it aloud, listening carefully, and you should hear a -ch- sound. In English, this sound can occur when the letter combination -tu- follows an r. Without a good visual memory, or deliberate practice spelling the word, "nurture" could remain a mystery. If you know that your visual memory is not as strong as it might be, it makes sense to practise spellings writing words by hand and by typing to encourage muscle memory.