If we assume that our brain picks up one new word per day, and that there are 1,000 languages and each one has 10,000 words, then it would take us 10 million years of learning to be able to talk to each and every person in the world.
But how many languages and words are there really? And how many would we need to learn to understand everything?
The story of a curious girl, Maya, will help us find out! Maya was sitting in the schoolyard, looking at yesterday's paper, when a teacher walked by.
The old man asked the young girl, what business she had reading the newspaper? To which Maya replied: I'm trying to understand them world.
To understand them world? How about learning some English first? her teacher countered.
At first, Maya was just upset, but then her frustration turned into motivation and she promised herself that she'd master English better than anyone, especially that stupid teacher.
Like most kids aged six, Maya understood about 5,000 words, used around 2,500, and held basic conversations.
Her brain had picked up more than one word a day since she was born and would continue to do so until late adulthood.
From the day she began her quest, it took her another 12 years of casual conversion and deliberate practice to learn the more nuanced aspects of the language like sarcasm and irony.
During that time her receptive vocabulary grew to 20,000 words and she expressed herself with about 10,000.
