How Our Memory Is Built?

We have talked about the vocabulary of Shakespeare, why will we know this? One of the answer is about our memory. If something we repeat twice, it would be remembered better than once. Likewise repeat three times would be better than two times. For instance, what we repeated mostly during life time could be the 26 letters, and we feel it is like rooted in our mind. From this we knew that a Chinese remember their characters is ten times clearer than English speaker for words, for in average during life time, a English speaker repeat 30,000 words while a Chinese speaker repeat 3,000 characters. And for the same reason, I reckon that no one will use English words better than Shakespeare, because at his time the English only had 1,7000 words, he could repeat them more times than today’s people. (The so called that Shakespeare knew 31,534 words is but contains all the derivation such as ‘girl’ and ‘girls’, ‘walk’ and ‘walked’ etc. )

Today, the English vocabulary is searing up over one million words, everybody can master roughly 30,000 words randomly among the one million words. So no one’s vocabulary can be understood by his audiences totally like Shakespeare did, then it is hard to do a sensitive work. One has to use a handful words to make everybody understand. That is to say following the vocabulary growing up, our room of employ words is narrowing.