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alberto-mlast Friday at 9:15 PM3 repliesview on HN

I got 96/100 with minimal guessing. Being a native speaker of a Romance language is a huge advantage here; words like “Quotidian” and “Defenestrate” might be exotic in English, but are almost trivial for an Italian.


Replies

Per_Bothnerlast Friday at 10:30 PM

"Defenestrate" was not in my list, but it's a word I would have gotten, as I know it from: (1) An A.C. Clarke short story ("The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch", in "Tales from the White Hart", if I remember correctly); and (2) The Defenstration of Prague (I have visited Prague Castle - there were apparently multiple defenestrations there). It's an interestingly (amusingly?) macabre word. (It also helps that I know high-school French and German plus understand Swedish as being very close to Norwegian.)

pratikdeogharelast Friday at 10:03 PM

Totally. After studying few hundred words of Spanish, German and French I thought hmm maybe a way to level up English is to learn basics of other languages. For example Fenster is Window in German. Defenestration becomes easy guess.

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avazhilast Friday at 10:01 PM

Interesting. I didn’t have defenestrate in mine - I’d assumed they used the same word list.