u/GreenTide17

Hi all!

I’ve picked up Spanish and French in the last few years mostly (but not entirely) through CI. I started with listening and then moved into reading after ~600 hours or so. I found that, after graded readers, nonfiction was *much* easier to read in each language than fiction.

I am interested in and almost entirely consume content related to politics, law, history, etc, and could comfortably have a political discussion *way* before I could comfortably order in a restaurant (I more or less still have this gap in French). When I first tried to read Animal Farm in Spanish, the political and economic vocabulary was fine, but I had to look up basically every word related to farm equipment.

I always assumed that this was strictly due to my interests, but I read somewhere on Reddit recently that this is owed to the similarities between English and Romance languages in high-register vocabulary, which makes a lot of sense. “Politics” es "política" est « politique », while “bed” es “cama” est « lit ».

I also vaguely recall reading once that the English distinctions between animals and meet came from the Norman conquest, with the people who could eat meat adopting French terms (bœuf>beef) while the people who raised animals kept the Germanic terms (kuh>cow).

With that said, does this advantage apply for native English or (proficient romance) speakers outside of these groups? Presumably it would still be easier to read about Portuguese or Italian law than Portuguese or Italian cooking, but with languages like Arabic (TL) or Mandarin with few cognates, would acquiring high-register vocabulary be more or less difficult than animal names?

And (assuming I am not entirely misremembering the Norman conquest argument on animal names), would German or Dutch have the inverse relation, where it would be markedly easier to learn “basic” vocabulary?

Thanks!