Heritage language learners soon learn that their verbal competence can be both a blessing and a burden. Reliance on aural cues can provide significant interference in attempts to master spelling conventions. Now, an unlikely source--the Russian-language internet--threatens to provide negative reinforcement for the very spelling habits that instructors want to correct. This article is an attempt to introduce the emerging phenomenon of "ear-spelling" in the Russian internet and to identify how these developments may affect heritage learners. (Contains 2 tables and 13 notes.)