30 odd years ago my O-level German course consisted of 4 parts
Oral
Aural (listening)
Reading
Writing
I'd say that's roughly in the order of decreasing importance for the beginner, and you can get away without spelling more for the first two than the last two.
My experience - in the month before I moved to Finland I listened to a Finnish language "Travel with Berlitz" cassette (shows how long ago that Audio books were on cassette) every day on my commute to and from work, so I probably went through it 10-15 times, learning by rote, without any spelling.
By they time I moved here, I could use Finnish numbers, tell the time, order in a restaurant and even ask the waitress for pepper when it wasn't on the table... so stick at the audio books, it's boring but they do work.
If you can do / mimic accents, it's not so difficult to quickly be able to make yourself understood, but when you get a reply that wasn't on the tapes... that's a different kettle of fish.
When the OP asks about spelling, I assume he? meant writing?
If the aim is survival, speaking, listening and reading are initially going to be way more important than writing.
But you will still need to be able to spell to look up words you've heard.
If the aim is fluency then write / spell as much as you can - do I remember hearing Neil Hardwick in an interview saying essay writing helped him?
Rosamunda wrote:Spelling is easy. Each letter of the Finnish alphabet has a unique sound and there are no irregular spellings, or silent letters - so it is written phonetically, sort of.
Easy to a linguist perhaps. To a layman, absolutely not.
Pronunciation is fairly straightforward if you can do the vowel sounds such as ö
https://youtu.be/BIpbMsgm5M0
and roll rs like Tigger, but that's only helpful when you are reading out loud, or already know how the word is spelled.
Listening to a native pronounce a word and trying to decode in real time is not easy - even if you can spell the word and understand vowel harmony and consonant gradation / kpt changes - which are just as bad as silent letters in english.
I still have particular difficulty with hearing the difference between a, aa, ä and ää.
And was it single or double consonant?
Was it tuli, tuuli or tulli?
Tikari, tikkari etc etc.
Not at all easy, even for people who've been at it for years.
I rely heavily on context, so isolated sentences still often throw me - initially.
