Are the following standard ways of using katakana?

Question

あなたの得意なスパニッシュフードを教えてください！私はそれを作ることにトライしたい。

スパニッシュフード (Spanish food).

トライ (try).

I'm a bit surprised, because I'm almost sure that there are no-katakana equivalents for words like food and try.

Is this a standard way of using katakana? Or the speaker is using more katakana than usual to sound more "Englishly"?

(Another one: ハードだろう)

Answer 1

First, it is not common at all to say 「スパニッシュフード」. We would mostly use 「スペイン料理{りょうり}」 or 「スペインの食{た}べ物{もの}」.

It sounds to me like this person was talking to a non-Japanese person who does not know much Japanese. (Is s/he speaking to you, perhaps?) The sentence itself would be very unnatural if said by one native speaker to another.

For how we would often phrase these, see @Chocolate's excellent comment above.

「トライ」, on the other hand, is quite common. This is a fairly natural usage here.

「ハードだろう」 is not so strange, either, but again, I feel a "reason" for the word choice, especially after seeing 「スパニッシュフード」.