Assamese spelling rules teachers get wrong most often

Most spelling marks are lost to six rules, not to rare words. Work through them in this order.

1. ৰ and ড় — decided by the root, not by the sound in speech.
2. Consonant clusters at the start of a borrowed word keep the source spelling.
3. Visarga survives in tatsama words and drops in tadbhava ones.
4. Long and short vowels in verb forms follow the tense, not the vowel you hear.
5. Compound words take a hyphen only where the parts are independent words.
6. Numerals written in words follow the traditional forms in formal writing.

The exceptions worth memorising are short — about forty words in total. Everything else follows the six rules above.