A child who writes My mother is in the chicken knows exactly what they mean. Their mother is in the kitchen. Two words simply swapped places in their head.

They are not alone in this, and the pattern behind it is worth understanding. Turkish is written as it sounds. A child writing kalem never hesitates. English is not built that way: letters go silent, the same letters make different sounds, and when two words look similar the eye stops distinguishing them.

Below are fifteen pairs Turkish students collide with regularly, with what causes each collision and something small to hold them apart.

1. kitchen / chicken: the same letters in a different order, so the eye reads them as one photograph. Chicken starts with the "ch" sound. Kitchen starts hard, like the pots and pans in it.

2. quite / quiet: two letters trade places and the meaning goes elsewhere. Quiet is two syllables and takes longer to say; quiet lasts. Quite finishes in one.

3. desert / dessert: one letter apart. The old trick still works: you always want a second dessert, and dessert has the second S. The desert has nothing spare.

4. lose / loose: loose carries two O's, wide like loose trousers. Lose is missing one, because something went missing.

5. affect / effect: affect is usually the action, effect usually the result. The A comes first in the alphabet and in the sentence: something affects you, then you see the effect.

6. advice / advise: the S one is the doing word. You advise someone, and what you hand them is advice.

7. live / leave: heard rather than read, these blur. Leave has the long "ee". Live is short and clipped.

8. than / then: than compares, then is time. A appears in "comparison", E appears in "when".

9. lie / lay: you lie down yourself; you lay something else down. If there is an object, it is lay.

10. borrow / lend: Turkish leans on one verb for both directions, so this collides constantly. You borrow from someone; you lend to someone.

11. teach / learn: the same trap. The teacher teaches. The student learns. Nobody "learns you" anything.

12. its / it's: the apostrophe is not possession here, it is a missing letter. It's means "it is". Everything else is its.

13. weather / whether: one is outside, one is a choice. Weather holds "eat", and you eat outdoors.

14. accept / except: accept takes something in, except leaves it out. Ex means out, as in exit.

15. through / thorough: thorough has the extra O and the extra work in it. Through just passes by.

What to do with a collision

Re-teaching one word of a pair does not help much, because neither word is missing. The two are stuck together.

What separates them is meeting them side by side, forced to choose. Show kitchen and chicken in the same round, with a sentence around each, and make the child pick. That decision is what pulls them apart. One round rarely finishes the job; the pair needs to come back a few days later, before the tangle re-forms.

Worth noticing at home: when your child gets a word wrong, look at what they chose instead. A random wrong answer means the word was never learned. A consistent wrong answer, the same substitution every time, means two words have collided, and that is a different problem with a different fix.

Try it with your class. GetSpeakin reads every answer and puts the words a child actually needs in front of them. Book a demo for your school.