Within a year and a half, most kids can pronounce 50 words and understand about 100 more. That figure explodes to 1,000 words by a child’s third birthday and to 6,000 just before the sixth birthday. Calculated from birth, we acquire new words at the rate of three per day. This project takes a long time to finish. English will require the mastery of about 50,000 words, and that doesn’t even include idioms and fixed expressions like “hitting a home run” or “pot of gold.”
