First of all, you shouldn't feel stupid just because you are struggling with one part of one subject of your studies. For example, my brother (a native English speaker) struggled with during school, and he was able to work through it, graduate from university, and now has a promising career. Keep your head up, and I wish you the best of luck. Now for some concrete strategies. First, you will need to see the words written at some point to know how to spell them. One way to do this is to simply read more. Find some authors that you like and read as many books as you can. While listening is a very important skill (I personally think it is much more important than spelling), if you really want to improve your spelling, reading will help more. Also, you can improve your reading out loud skills. This will help you decipher how to go from a written word to a spoken word, which can assist in going the other way as well. Learn all of the rules of pronunciation (such as a -e at the end of the word changing the vowel from short to long in cases such as "mad" and "made"). Here is a list of some common rules: http://www.rong-chang.com/prules.htm .