A different concept of difficult English words

Question

I’m interested in building up my English vocabulary, but whenever I look for “difficult English words” or “advanced vocabulary” I’m presented with a list of polysyllabic words such as: aberration, abhor, acquiesce, amiable, appease, arcane, avarice, etc.

Being a Spaniard, I found all these mostly Latin-rooted words quite easy. The difficult words for me are the monosyllabic ones with Old English or Germanic roots, such as: bask, botch, dun, garble, goon, helm, knit, knoll, lath, lye, muck, pry, quell, slat, swig, stump, tussle, wan, whet, etc.

Do you know of any Internet resources devoted to vocabulary building but centered in words of this kind? I haven’t been able to find one. Or do you have any idea about how I should proceed?

I’m sure most native speakers of Romance languages share this problem.

Answer 1

It appears that the words relate to "areas such as the human body, animals, farming, the weather, family relationships, colours, landscape features, and human activities such as cooking, eating, sewing, hunting and carpentry." You might want to focus your study on these areas using whatever method suits you. You could browse websites, read forums, or join on-line groups related to those topics.

You might also want to to take it upon yourself to do something about this, while at the same time helping other learners who, as you said, probably have the same problem. You could start a blog or podcast about Anglo-Saxon English words and share articles / resources. This might help you a lot.

How do you usually study vocabulary?

Answer 2

I’ve found the following Wikipedia articles very useful in learning about the origin of English words from other languages.

• List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents in English

• List of English words with dual French and Anglo-Saxon variations

• List of English Latinates of Germanic origin

• Lists of English loanwords by country or language of origin

Answer 3

I know what you are saying. The problem consists on learning words in plain, down-to-earth, language rather than abstract concepts. Some ideas are:
-- read books, such as novels, written in a not so formal language (example Jack London). You can go to library/bookstore and browse authors of this kind.
-- use detailed visual/pictures dictionaries. These have pictures of material objects or plain activities.
-- another way is to watch movies or serials especially if they have lots of dialogue. TV works for this purpose (there is continuous talk on TV). Movies have plain, non-academic language.