So for the past couple of weeks I've been trying to learn the langauge. At first I thought Everything was translated from english spelling. However I've come to relize that this isn't always te case. Which has been confusing me. Long story short, Are words broken down by meaning or spelling? Because I've seen both ways and its starting to confuse me when I try to read the langauge. 

Think of Dovahzul as you would of an extinct real-world language, say Latin. 'Father' in Latin is pater, and these words look similar. But 'fire' is ignis, and these words do not. There is no rule to translate words from one to the other; the only way to know is to use a dictionary. Same goes for English and Dovahzul.

Proper names, however, are transcribed by spelling when writing runes: Meikel 'Michael', Deyvid 'David'.

The situation is complicated by the fact that known Dovahzul vocabulary is very small by usual standards, only 650ish words. Not all texts can be translated at all, and many require creative rephrasing.

Could you give examples of some words that have confused you?

Hi rexosaurss, thanks for your question! The dragon language has its own set of vocabulary based on meaning. Some words are very similar to English, like viing 'wing' or iiz 'ice', but there's no spelling pattern for making a dragon word from an English one. What you'll want to do is learn and memorize the vocabulary. Check out the Memrise course if you haven't already!

Frinmulaar

Think of Dovahzul as you would of an extinct real-world language, say Latin. 'Father' in Latin is pater, and these words look similar. But 'fire' is ignis, and these words do not. There is no rule to translate words from one to the other; the only way to know is to use a dictionary. Same goes for English and Dovahzul.

Proper names, however, are transcribed by spelling when writing runes: Meikel 'Michael', Deyvid 'David'.

The situation is complicated by the fact that known Dovahzul vocabulary is very small by usual standards, only 650ish words. Not all texts can be translated at all, and many require creative rephrasing.

Could you give examples of some words that have confused you?

thank you for your help

If this is the case, where did the fan-made words come from?

^That system was put on hold because 1) old fan-made words were in a permanent cycle of revision because our understanding of the original language accumulated, 2) the average wordmaker tended to view dragontongue as an extension of English, and 3) giving all 6,000 words a detailed, high quality entry would have taken far too long.