Maybe you can redeem yourself with this question haha

-ly: in a way that ~ -less: without ~

I noticed that with ~less, I can work out the meaning of the word just by applying “without ~”. In other words, just focusing on word attack strategies.

However, with ~ly, using “in a way that ~” is not enough to infer the meaning of most -ly words. I still have to rely on contextual clues, such as reading sentences before and after the location of a -ly word in a paragraph.

Would you happen to know why some suffixes are easier to decipher than others?