When's the last time you needed to count the number of things inside a larger thing?
The point is that LLMs don't speak / think in English. Asking them about spelling is like asking a Chinese speaker, during a text chat with translation, about English spelling. We can give the Chinese speaker access to an app to translate back to English so they can answer these questions. But they (the LLM) don't currently have access to that.
They don't think or speak anything at all. They use a statistical model to predict the next most likely token to display in response to a prompt.
s/speak \/ think/operate/
If that makes you happy.