I had a year of Latin, in 1991/92, so I've forgotten pretty much everything (except the little singsong mnemonic of the present tense indicative and passive verb endings). But I do have a ridiculous vocabulary and a good memory for random trivial crap. This may also help.
(I carried on a basic conversation with an old woman in Japan who spoke no English for a good 5-10 minutes. After taking 2 years of university Japanese 8 years before. When I say my language ability is unusual, I'm not joking. I'm functionally illiterate in Japanese, however.)
I probably do have a biased expectation, because I'm not aware of just how unusual my ability is.
Though regarding context - if people read books, they come across words they don't know. I don't pick up my dictionary at every new word (unless it keeps coming up and knowing exactly what it means would be a huge damn help, or if I need to know what it means because the sentence could be sarcastic and that would change the implied meaning (this is more often a problem in German)). I think most of my friends read SF & F often enough to be familiar with made-up words and can guess from context, so maybe I expect that to apply in mundania too?
I really don't know. It's come up a couple times fairly recently, and I was like "wtf, how couldn't you figure that out? it's not hard..." so I thought I'd ask my people in the internet how far off base I am.
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(I carried on a basic conversation with an old woman in Japan who spoke no English for a good 5-10 minutes. After taking 2 years of university Japanese 8 years before. When I say my language ability is unusual, I'm not joking. I'm functionally illiterate in Japanese, however.)
I probably do have a biased expectation, because I'm not aware of just how unusual my ability is.
Though regarding context - if people read books, they come across words they don't know. I don't pick up my dictionary at every new word (unless it keeps coming up and knowing exactly what it means would be a huge damn help, or if I need to know what it means because the sentence could be sarcastic and that would change the implied meaning (this is more often a problem in German)). I think most of my friends read SF & F often enough to be familiar with made-up words and can guess from context, so maybe I expect that to apply in mundania too?
I really don't know. It's come up a couple times fairly recently, and I was like "wtf, how couldn't you figure that out? it's not hard..." so I thought I'd ask my people in the internet how far off base I am.