Here’s an extremely useful rule that seemingly every native English speaker is taught during childhood writing lessons, but which, if English is not your first language, you probably haven’t heard.

Annoyingly, the sound / iː/ can be rendered in a confusing range of different vowels in English. Two of these are ‘ie’ and ‘ei’ which in many words are pronounced identically. So, when you are spelling ‘believe’ and ‘receive’ how do you know which spelling to choose? Repeat after me: ‘i’ goes before ‘e’ except when it immediately follows ‘c’. Simple! Test it out on a few words and you’ll see how well it works.

If you would like private English lessons with me, get in touch!